Thursday, March 31, 2011

‘Mela Shalimar Ka’ is a decades old poem by the late Ghulam Mustafa Tabbassum, known as Sufi Tabbassum, which still echoes in the mind of those belonging to the generation of the 60s and 70s since its about the golden days of the Mela Chiraghan (Festival of Lamps), also known as Mela Shalimar Kaí which started on Friday here in the provincial metropolis.

The Mela Chiraghan is a jewel in the crown of the culture of Punjab, the Land of Five Rivers, the land of peace, tranquillity, love, open-heartedness and hospitality that it was just a few decades back.

The Mela Chiraghan has been associated with the great Sufi saint, poet, revolutionary and a crusader of human freedom and rights, Shah Hussain, who is buried in Baghbanpura, near Shalimar Bagh.

People of the locality, the adjacent and nearby villages and from all every nook and corner of the province come over to the great Sufi saint's shrine to light a lamp on his grave only to get their wishes fulfilled.

Mela Chiraghan (Festival of Lights) or Mela Shalimar Ka is a three-day annual festival to mark the Urs of Shah Hussain. The festival used to take place in the Shalimar Gardens also until President Ayub Khan ordered against it in 1958. The festival used to be the largest in the whole Punjab, second to Basant. It is still one of grand events in the provincial capital and hundreds of thousands of devotees from all over the country take part in the festivity.

Shah Hussain, also called the poet of love, was born in 1538 AD. He was a radical thinker. His poetry has a spellbinding effect on the listeners at the shrine illuminated by thousands of lamps and candles. ‘Mai Nae Main Kinon Aakhan,’ ‘Mahi Mahi Kookdi’, ‘Rabba Meray Hal Da Mehram Toon’, ‘Mandi Han Kay Changi Han, Sahab Teri Bandi Han’ and ‘Mein Vi Jana Jhok Ranjhan Di Nal Meray Koi Challay’ are among some of his famous Kafees.

He was the first Punjabi Sufi poet whose writings were a mixture of five languages, i.e. Punjabi, Pothohari, Hindi, Persian and Arabic. His Kafees are so simple that one can understand his message without any difficulty.

‘Knowing God by knowing ourselves’ is the main theme of his poetry.

His work is romantic and has all symbols of rich romantic tradition. Shah Hussainís Kafees have been sung by lovers of Sufi poetry for centuries. His poetry will continue to mesmerise the next generations with its message of peace and love.

Dr Mohan Singh Diwana collected 163 of Shah Hussainís Kafees and according to his findings, Shah Hussain was a true scholar and intellectual. Some researchers wrote that Guru Nanak was the first poet who wrote Kafees in Punjabi language but, the Kafees of Shah Hussain, Bulleh Shah, Sachal Sarmast, Khawaja Ghulam Farid and Pir Qutab Ali Shah are gems of the Punjabi literature.

Devotees attribute a number of Karamaat (miracles) to Shah Hussain. One may or may not believe them, but no one can deny the literary genius of the saint. Even today, his poetry attracts a great audience.

The marble-domed memorial of the Sufi poet at Baghbanpura, near the Shalimar Gardens, does not appear to be old. It is said that after his death in 1599 AD, Shah Hussain was buried at Shahdara, on the western bank of the Ravi, but a few years later, the tomb was swept away by a flood. Then, it was shifted to its present site.

Besides the grave of Shah Hussain under the same dome, there is also a grave of Madhu Lal, a son of a Hindu Brahmin, with whom the saint was deeply attached. Therefore, a large number of Hindus also come to attend his Urs.

During the festival, drummers perform at the shrine and youths and women dance to a deafening beat. The festival attracts a large number of artistes who sing his Kafees and dance to the drums. Locals said the shrine was a focal point for celebrating Basant before the partition.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh used to celebrate Basant at the tomb. Once, Maharaja gave robes of honour to all his cabinet members and ordered them to reach the tomb in Basanti dresses. The infantry was ordered to dress in the same colour and stand on both sides of the road from the Lahore Fort to the Shah Hussainís tomb.

One of the attractions of the festival is its bazaar. In the past, it was a major point of shopping, but presently it has been reduced to the sale of general goods, toys, edibles, garments and bangles.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Anita Singhvi has been invited to sing at the Urs of Nizamuddin Auliya. She tells Veenu Sandhu about her life in music.

The air is thick with the fragrance of roses. Narrow alleyways lined with colourful shops that sell perfumes or offerings to be made at the shrine of Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya lead to the dargah where the saint and his disciple, Sufi mystic Amir Khusrau, have been resting for centuries.

Close by, at Khwaja Hall, a gathering is in place. The hall is filled with men, many of whom are wearing four-cornered bright yellow caps (kulah), the kind Nizamuddin Auliya and his disciples used to wear. There is only a handful of women in this room, and they all sit in one corner.

Facing them, at the far end, are the speakers, who, like everybody else, are seated on the floor. Among them is a woman wearing a saree of as bright a yellow as the caps. “That,” she later says, “was a coincidence.”

Anita Singhvi, ghazal and Sufi singer, makes an unusual picture in this setting. But she looks comfortable, and happy. In a sense, she’s in the world which has given her music — she used to confine herself to Hindustani classical — a new meaning.

Singhvi has been invited because she is to be felicitated by Khwaja Hasan Sani Nizami, the spiritual leader of the Nizamuddin Dargah in Delhi, for her voice, which celebrates the music of Sufi saints in both Urdu and Persian. The Khwaja presents her with a copy of the Qur’an in Hindi. The timing, Singhvi feels, could not have been more auspicious. It is the 707th Urs, or death anniversary, of Khawaja Nizamuddin Auliya, a time when the devout from across the city and elsewhere come to this shrine to be blessed.

Urs literally means “wedding”, which the Sufi saints referred to as a union with the beloved (the divine) after death. During this Urs, Singhvi has been invited to perform at the dargah. It is a rare honour, because she is a woman and a non-Muslim. But Khwaja Hasan, speaking to the gathering, says: “Khwateen ko gaane ki koi pabandhi nahin hai” (“Women are not prohibited from singing”).

He narrates a story to drive the message home, of a time when women were stopped from singing and the result was that for 300 years, “Dilli chiragh-heen rahi” (“Delhi remained in the dark”). Sufism, he adds, is all-embracing.

Wherever the Sufi saints went, they learnt the language of that place and made it part of their poetry, says Khwaja Hasan.

Singhvi, who was born in Jodhpur and was married at the age of 18 to Abhishek Manu Singhvi, now a Congress leader, says she never imagined that her journey would lead her to sing the words of poets like Ghalib, Khusrau, Faiz, Momin, Meer, Daag and Rumi.

“When I got married at a young age, my guru in Jodhpur made me pledge that I would never give up singing,” she says. She kept her promise. Now, mornings are reserved for riyaz (practice), though the evenings are mostly busy. “In the evening my house will be full of politicians who will accompany my husband, or else it will turn into a studio with television channels coming to interview him on one issue or the other,” she says.

While she would rather be left with her music and books, she says she has also learnt to somehow balance these two aspects of her life — politics and the thirst for Sufism.

The turning point in her life came when she heard Begum Akhtar. The more she listened to her, the deeper she was drawn into Urdu and Persian poetry. More than 250 concerts and five albums later, Singhvi says she is finally getting to understand the depth of the language and the poetry. She has learnt to read, write and speak both Urdu and Persian.

Once, at Jamia Millia Islamia, where she performs regularly, she sang Persian compositions for two and a half hours. In her second album, Sada-e-Sufi by Saregama India (the first, Naqsh-e-Noor, and fourth, Tajalli, were also from Saregama) three out of nine songs are in Persian. A translation, she felt, would rob them of their meaning and depth.

Another album, Zah-e-Naseen, produced by Big Music, took shape after composer Khayyam and his wife Jagjit Kaur heard Singhvi sing Begum Akhtar’s ghazals. In the album, Khayyam, who has composed music for her, says, “Her voice is fresh and unusual... Inko Urdu aur Farsi se junoon ki had tak mohabbat hai” (“She is obsessively passionate about Urdu and Persian”).

Singhvi says she would rather perform at live concerts, where singing fine poetry that reaches out to the audience gives her a joy like no other. She’s performed, among other places, in West Asia, Europe, America, Pakistan (“where the audience left me overwhelmed”), back home in Jodhpur, and in California, which was one of the longest performances, close to four hours.

Singhvi, who has a heavy bass voice, has also performed often at Ghalib Academy and at the Milad functions (the Prophet’s birthday) at Jamia University. In 2007, she received the Mallika-e-Tarannum (queen of melody) award from the Husn Ara Trust.

Trained in the Gwalior Gharana, Singhvi has gone from singing ghazals and dadra to Sufiana kalam. The range has equipped her to make her own compositions, where she at times adds Meera and Kabir to Ghalib.

“In a way, my condition is like Meera’s,” she says. “One part of me wants to go out and visit every dargah, listen to the philosophers, soak in as much beauty as there is in Urdu and Persian poetry as possible. But another part of me holds me back.”

In the midst of this, she says, she has created an atmosphere around her where Sufism coexists in harmony with politics.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

By Jan Khaskheli, *Govt plans to engage shrines in fight against extremism* - The News International - Karachi, Pakistan; Friday, March 25, 2011

The government in Sindh has adopted a strategy to convince the caretakers of the shrines of Sufi saints to help stop the fresh wave of extremism in the province, believing they (caretakers) have influence over 85 percent of the population and may play a key role in helping the government to deal with the crisis.

These views were expressed by Senior Minister Pir Mazharul Haq on the occasion of the Sakhi Lal Shahbaz Qalandar Sufi Conference held at an auditorium in Sehwan.

The conference was organised by the Jamshoro district government and Jamaat Saleheen, Gulistan Bahu Welfare Trust International, Punjab.

The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) would follow the Sufi’s discourse to stop the wave of extremism in Sindh, he added.

Mazhar announced organising international Sufi conferences annually at Sehwan to promote Sufism. Ministers from Sindh and Balochistan, including Syed Murad Ali Shah, Ayaz Soomro, Taj Haider, Sadiq Umrani and Ali Madad Jotak, as well as PPP leaders, writers and caretakers of shrines of Sufi saints hailing from Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan attended the conference.

Backing the idea floated by Sakhi Khalid Sultan Al-Qadri, caretaker of Shaikh Sultan Bahu, Mazhar said the government would organise such gatherings in all parts of the province to promote peace, tolerance and harmony. “People of Sindh for long have been the followers of Sufi saints. They do not believe in hatred and extremism. The PPP is the party of Sufis and we will establish the centre of Sufis at the shrine of Qalandar Lal Shahbaz in Sehwan.”

The senior minister stated that the PPP had come to power because it had the blessing of Sufi saints and would face all the visible challenges with their help. He said that the Sindh government would discuss the idea of forming a Sufi council, a separate forum to organise Sufis by establishing its offices at local, district and provincial levels to promote Sufism in order to counter the wave of extremism.

He said Sufi scholars would be invited from all over the world to guild the people in Pakistan, who, he said, were being misguided by certain elements.

Sakhi Khalid Sultan, who was presiding over the event, said that they had come there to promote peaceful ideas among the people. He appealed to the participants to spread the message of tolerance and peace in society.

“We are not from ‘barud walas’ (bombers), but of ‘Darud walas’. Faqirs (saints) are not bombers but preachers of peace and harmony,” he said, adding that the Sufi saints spread the message of love and fought evil forces.

“People want to live peacefully and do not believe in extremism.” Sultan condemned elements targeting shrines in the country, and vowed to fight these subversive elements by spreading the teachings of Sufi saints.

Minister Sadiq Umrani from Balochistan said that their party had always served Sufi saints. He appealed to the followers of Sufi saints to come together to fight evils destabilising the nation and bringing a bad name to the country.

Faqir Aijaz Ali, a Sufi scholar and organiser of the conference, said that Sufis always preached the message of peace. They had always worked for the unity among humanity. This conference aimed to see the land of Sindh like it was in the past, he added.

Monday, March 28, 2011

His voice lifts your soul and his music reverberates through your spirit.

Not one to bow down to the rules of the industry, the talented Kailash Kher has remained true to himself throughout his journey as a musician. Tasting astounding success with his "Allah ke Bande" in 2002, Kailash has struck the right balance between independent music and filmy naach-gana. In Chennai for the ‘Unplugged’ concert for Fever Entertainment, Kailash and his band Kailasa, will thrill the city with their unique sounds.

Speaking to Deccan Chronicle about his fans in Chennai, Kailash says, “Chennai’s audience is culturally inclined and intellectually motivated. We will enthrall them with a repertoire that has been appreciated by diverse audiences. We plan to sing hit numbers from our albums and a couple of popular film songs too.”

Clearly, Kailash is no stranger to the city having visited here often, but mostly on work. Talking about his colleagues in Kollywood, Kailash says, “I have sung for most composers in the south and have enjoyed working with all of them.” But a certain young composer has his special regard. “I get along very well with GV Prakash. He is very young and talented. He gave me my first hit in Tamil cinema with "Veyilodu Vilaiyadi" at the start of his career,” he gushes.

The singer also likes to pay his good friend A.R. Rahman a visit every time he is in town. Kailash speaks fondly of Rahman’s mother. “I always make time to stop by Rahman’s house and have food made by his mother. Amma always serves me with love and whatever she makes is very special.”

Kailash’s favourite among his own hits are "Saiyyan", "Teri Deewani" and "Aaj Mere Piya Ghar Aavenge". And, he promises to live up to his motto of promoting non-film music with his band ‘Kailasa’, this Sunday at Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Roa Concert Hall in Harrington Road.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Very few poets get published, let alone in the International Herald Tribune when they are 12 years old. It is somewhat amusing then, and perhaps a mark of the humbleness of poet Manav Sachdeva, SIPA ’03, that he does not remember the incident.

What he does remember is that his father had heard from teachers at school that Sachdeva’s handwriting was “horrific” and made him practice lines. Sachdeva smiled and said, “I found it oppressively boring, so somehow I started playing with words.” A career in poetry began and now “The Sufi’s Garland,” Sachdeva’s first collection of poems, will officially release this Friday, March 25, from Roman Books.

“The Sufi’s Garland,” which chronicles the journey of a nomadic fakir, has emotional and spiritual undertones reminiscent of the work of 18th-century American greats like Emily Dickinson.Yet poetry is not Sachdeva’s primary profession: he is a consultant to the United Nations. His two job roles, that of poet and that of humanitarian, “are not interrelated in a perfect sense,” Sachdeva said, but “they inform one another.”

At the School of International and Public Affairs , Sachdeva concentrated in both poetry and politics. “I have always felt that poets have an impact on policy,” Sachdeva said, adding that poets can “write lines to inspire nations, whether it be revolution or oppression, or to inspire minorities of the population.”

“The Sufi’s Garland” has been 15 years in the making. Sachdeva began writing the now-published manuscript long before he came to Columbia for graduate school. Yet it was here in New York that he began to consider his poetry more deeply, after talking to renowned poets at the School of the Arts like Alice Quinn, an adjunct professor in the writing division.

Sachdeva’s poems, in fragments and pieces of various languages ranging from English to Hindi to Pubjabi, were strong in content, but needed to be edited and combined to form a whole.The poems that survived the revision process are strikingly all in English, but not without explanation from their author. Sachdeva sent his original, multi-lingual manuscript out to American publishers but faced a series of rejections. “I was making a mistake of sending to American publishers in different languages, who couldn’t understand why,” Sachdeva said.

Sachdeva has found success writing in English but still has plans to print a future collection in his native languages. For now, he is content to bask in the satisfaction of being a newly published author.

“The Sufi’s Garland,” while literally following the journey of a nomad, is also a journey within Sachdeva’s own mind. “In a way, this was a reckoning to accept different kinds of philosophies, and different hearts, and different ways to receive the world,” Sachdeva said. “I was getting afraid of how many places my mind was going, and I reached a point where I accepted that the mind is an uncontainable act ... It is alright not to judge the mind.” “The Sufi’s Garland” is an acceptance of that belief.

When asked what he would like the reader to take away from his poetry, Sachdeva recalled a song about pilgrimage. “It’s sort of what I would like them [the readers] to walk away with, to try to keep this as a journey to the beloved,” he said. “It’s sort of as if you were walking, that part of your own spirit or life, but that love has no destination. It is the destination itself. You have to walk with love itself.” This is what Sachdeva seems to mimic in his own life, whether it be at the U.N. or through his poetry—there is no destination, but only a path to walk.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Most of us studied Kabir’s dohas in school, and then forgot them soon after. But now the soon-to-be-launched Azim Premji University plans to include Kabir’s dohas in its post-graduate courses on education, development and teacher education.

It was a chance meeting with Shabnam Virmani that convinced Anurag Behar, co-CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation, of the pedagogic potential of Kabir’s dohas — his couplets expounding home truths and preaching religious harmony. Virmani leads the Kabir Project which explores how the 15th century mystic poet continues to survive in diverse social, political, religious and spiritual spaces in India and parts of Pakistan.

Also, the Kabir Project is now supported by Wipro Applying Thought in Schools and will look at how Kabir can be taught in more dynamic ways in schools, including those supported by the Azim Premji Foundation in rural and urban areas.

A documentary film-maker, 45-year-old Virmani is artist in residence at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. She’s also co-founder of the Drishti Media Arts and Human Rights collective, where she directed several documentaries in partnership with grassroots women’s groups.

Virmani’s tryst with Kabir began in 2002. She was living in Ahmedabad then, and saw first hand the anti-Muslim riots that followed the Godhra carnage. Kabir seemed to call out to her — “Sadho, dekho jag baurana!” (Oh seekers, see the world’s gone mad!). “I instinctively felt that this man was saying what I felt,” Virmani says. In 2003, she set off, camera in hand, travelling all over, meeting people who sang, loved, quoted, revered and interpreted Kabir for a living.

Seven years down the line, some of these experiences have found their way into four documentary films, several music CDs and books. Now, she and her team are working on a virtual encylopaedia of Kabir and other mystic poets, incorporating meanings of these poems through text, audio and video clips of songs, reflections, art works and conversations.

The Ford Foundation has support the Kabir Project with three grants of roughly Rs 2.5 crore [USD 548.000.-], covering a period of 10 years from 2003-2013.

Shabnam says, she had set out thinking she would preach Kabir to the “violent, misguided ones out there”. But soon Kabir started “speaking to me...showing me the fissures in my own mind, the violence (gross or subtle) and the dishonesties I am capable of when I construct and defend my ego”.

In 2003, she spent three days in Damakheda village in Chhattisgarh, amidst followers of the Dharamdasi Kabir Panth sect at their annual chauka aarti festival. “I was able to see the divisiveness of religion, its unholy nexus with politics and commerce, the distortions and exploitation in the practice of ritual. But I was also moved to see the faith and spirit with which people gathered there. I began to recognise the power and attraction rituals can hold.”

This uneasy tension became the underlying quest of her film Kabira Khada Bazaar Mein: Journeys with Sacred and Secular Kabir. It follows the life of Prahlad Tipanya, a folk singer and activist of the secular group Eklavya, who decided to join the Kabir Panth as a mahant (cleric). The film tracks the opposing pulls of the individual and the collective, the spiritual and the social, as Tipanya tries to translate the ideas of Kabir into his life.

Shabnam now aims to make the Kabir Project self-sustaining and support the folk artistes and oral traditions which keep Kabir alive. Part of the proceeds from the films and audio CDs, thus, have been used for this purpose.

In March 2010, she organised the first Malwa Kabir Yatra. The nine-day yatra started from Luniyakhedi village, Tipanya’s home, and travelled through villages and large cities such as Ujjain and Indore in eight districts, spreading the message of Kabir through live music and film screenings.

It brought together folk singers, activists, artists, students with rural audiences ranging from 1,000 to 13,000, putting on the same platform the many different Kabir oral traditions.

It gave rural audiences in Malwa a chance to appreciate for the first time the spirit of Kabir in Kutchi, Gujarati and Marwari folk music, through the voices of Mooralala Marwada, Hemant Chauhan and Mukhtiyar Ali.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

A good number of devotees from all walks of life thronged the Dargah (mosque) on Linghi Chetty Street [Chennai] for the 64th Urs of Qutubul Akhtab Hazrath Hafiz Syed Habib Mohammed Hasan Moulana Khadiri Baghdadi (Raz), the 31st descendant of Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) and the 19th descendant of Hazrat Ghouse-ul-Aazam Dastageer (Raz), on Friday night (March 11).

The Sufi saint, who was born in Baghdad came to India in the early 20th century with his father Hazrath Syed Mohammed Rasheed Maulana Baghdadi Khadiri (Raz), to propagate Sufism. Trained by Colombo's patron saint Hazrath Syed Saleh Maulana Madani (Raz), the Hazrath became a Qutub, which is the highest order in Islamic spiritualism.

Night-long prayerThe saint, revered by the people of India in general and the people of Hyderabad and Chennai in particular, chose Mannady as his final resting place. That he is still remembered and venerated could be seen from the congregation which assembled for the occasion. H. Habibullah Shah, Sajjad-e-Nasheen and Muthavalli of the dargah led the night-long prayers which commenced with Zikhr. Poems, hymns and salutations were also recited on the occasion.

The Bijli Brothers – Afzal, Tahir, Ameen and Yousuf Qurashi stole the show with their immaculate rendering of the salaam. A number of ulemas and dignitaries including the Chief Khazi to the Government of Tamil Nadu, Salahuddin Md Ayub, Prof. Fayaz Bijli and Afzal Quraishi (DGM, HAL) were present.

The function came to an end with the recital of the Quran after Fajar prayers the next morning.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Dr. Farooq Ahmad Peer rummages through the pages of history finishing with a hopeful note

Historians believe that Kashmir used to be a huge lake - named Kashyap Sar - before human beings began to inhabit it. According to Nilmata Purana as well as Kalhana’s Rajtarangini, the Valley of Kashmir was a lake and Kashyap Rishi, a grandson of Brahama, is said to have drained out the waters of this lake, enabling people to settle on the land which thus emerged.

Nagas are believed to be the original inhabitants of Kashmir but recent discoveries put forward by archaeologists made at Burzahom, sixteen kilometers east of Srinagar establish that there lived some people before the Nagas also. And later a tribe believed to be Aryans made their way into Kashmir.

As the population increased, there was need of more land. Some people of the Aryan origin left the Valley and settled in other parts of the world. But those who did not leave and continued to remain here were known as Kashmiris. As believed Kashmiris have Aryan blood and have the same physical appearances, with fair complexion, strong, sound and handsome body. In the ancient times, Kashmir was dominated by Hindus but afterwards Islam spread in this part of the World, for which the influx of foreign adventurers, both from the south and from Central Asia had prepared the ground.

In the spread of Islam, the Sufis and Sayyids played a pivotal role. People were at that time dissatisfied with the misrule of their kings and the exploitation of Brahmins. The kings, the courtiers, royal persons, officers were lavishly and involved in immoral affairs; the condition of the people was miserable and they were in despair. Any sort of relief or change which could unshackle them from the obsolete customs, traditions and cruel political situation, was sure to be embraced.

But it is also a fact that the Hindu rulers seem to have been benevolent and generous to those who tried to bring the faith of Islam to Kashmir. The role of Sufis and Sayyids was also instrumental in spreading Islam here and the most important conversion which took place was that of the King Rinchana, by Bulbul Shah (RA).

The arrival of Sayyids is remarkably remembered mainly due to the arrival and great services rendered by Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani (RA) who introduced Islam here in letter and spirit and also introduced the Kubraviya order of Sufism in the Valley.

At the time Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani (RA) made his way into Kashmir, there was a handful of Muslims who had managed to establish a few mosques and alm–houses, but their traditions, culture, customs and habits were the same as those of the majority of people who were Hindus. Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani (RA), denounced all those practices which were against the spirit of Islam and devoted himself in transforming the country of Kashmir into an Islamic society.

Another great Sayyid who made a significant contribution towards the mission of spreading Islam in Kashmir was Mir Sayyid Mohammad Hamdani (RA), son of Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani (RA). Besides, the great services rendered by the Sayyids in changing the society of Kashmir into a morally sound one, the contributions of Sheikh Noor-ud–Din (RA), gave impetus to the spread of Islamic teachings and it is believed without any doubt that he transformed the social fabric in Kashmir.

The philosophy and simplicity of the Sheikh (RA) has deeply influenced the people of Kashmir irrespective of caste, colour, religion and creed. He is venerated everywhere and by everybody. He taught the concept of humanism, love, meditation, equality, and worship to God. His philosophy did not only teach spiritual equality of man but also involved economic and social equality. He loved all and inspired this society through his eternal verses which are cherished in the memory of Kashmiris.

History is witness to the fact that Kashmir has been a land of attraction for everybody and from the ancient times it has been a sacred land in which saints and sages meditated and worshiped devoutly. The great scholars and intellectuals of the world have visited this place and have given their own impressions and observations about Kashmir and Kashmiris. But this spiritually motivated culture in Kashmir seems to be withering away.

Kashmir has been deeply rooted in its tradition in the past and has survived under the onslaught of foreign invasions and intruders. The simple life of the people has survived the shock of many centuries of alien rule and people here have braved poverty, strife, conflicts, droughts, plagues, floods. But the circumstances in the present day life of Kashmir reveal that the rich legacy and the rich traditions on which the foundation of this society was laid, are under the materialistic onslaught. Spiritual values which were the pride of this society are receding in the other nations of the world today like Kashmir.

The people of Kashmir are simple, mild, hospitable, intelligent, and possess great abilities. They are always active and industrious to do something for themselves and for the society. There is no dearth of talent and intelligence and this soil has given birth to great leaders, thinkers poets, writers, scholars, doctors, teachers who have made their name at the national as well as at the international level.

Kashmiris are peace loving by nature but at times are sentimental and surprisingly unpredictable, a fact which certain great historians and noted foreign travelers have also marked. There is no possibility of denying the fact that due to situational instability, Kashmiris have always remained confused and so at times they react and behave in a manner which marks them as skeptical and volatile. This instability has made them victims of exploitation and vulnerability and as a matter of fact indecisiveness.

But there is no doubt that Kashmiris are intelligent and witty to understand what is right. Sir Walter Lawrence rightly remarks that “The Kashmiri is what his rulers have made him, but I believe and hope that two generations of a just and strong rule will transform him into a useful, intelligent and fair honest man.” The Kashmiris really need to have honest rulers who give them respect, justice and fair dealing with the aim to build confidence among them. And that they are really treated in a manner they deserve.

This kind of dealing shall make Kashmir a symbol of humanism, possessing a unique identity and culture which preserved it from the bloodshed committed in the name of religion elsewhere after partition.

The common Kashmiri wishes to live in peace like other people of the world and has a dream to take his nation to the heights of success in every sphere of life. However, the prevalent scenario shows that the condition and position of Kashmiris is grim and dreary with no hope of coming out of this situation. But times have proved that Kashmiris are courageous to brave all the situations. It is this bravery which shall make them defeat all the odds.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The Oxford University Press on Tuesday launched its latest publication ‘At the Shrine of the Red Sufi: Five Days and Nights on Pilgrimage in Pakistan’ written by the renowned German cultural anthropologist, Jürgen Wasim Frembgen.

Translated from German by Jane Ripken, the book takes the reader on a journey to experience the spiritual rapture, ecstasy, trance, magic, and devotion at the annual Urs celebrations held at Sehwan Sharif in honour of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar (LSQ), Pakistan’s most Sufi popular saint.

Stefan Weidner, a renowned writer and expert on Islam, has judged this book [German language version] as “one of the most exciting reports we owe to German cultural anthropology in recent decades”.

Dr Jürgen Wasim Frembgen is Chief Curator of the Oriental Department at the Museum of Ethnology in Munich as well as Professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Munich. He has been a visiting professor at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad and the National College of Arts in Lahore.

The speakers were of the view that Frembgen’s book was of immense value as there is no other record in this depth of pilgrimage in Pakistan to an old and famous shrine, with detailed information of the different kinds of groups that participate, their rites and rituals of devotion, and the sacred geography of shrines and pilgrimages for qalandars in Pakistan.

***From the Oxford University Press Pakistan's website:

Readership / Level The narrative combines ethnographic “thick description” with a literary approach. This book is recommended for people interested in Islam, the lived Sufi tradition, Pakistan in general as well as literature reflecting quotidian Pakistani life.

About the AuthorJürgen Wasim Frembgen is Chief Curator of the Oriental Department at the Museum of Ethnology in Munich as well as Professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Munich. Since 1981 he has been teaching anthropology and Islamic Studies at different universities in Germany; in addition he had been a visiting professor at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad (National Institute of Pakistan Studies), National College of Arts in Lahore, and Ohio State University in Columbus, USA.

He has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan (for instance in Nager and Hunza/Karakoram, Indus Kohistan, Punjab, and Sindh) on an annual basis since 1981.

He has written extensively on cultures of the Eastern Muslim world between Iran and India, focusing particularly on Pakistan. Many of his books and articles deal with Islam, the Sufi tradition, veneration of Muslim saints, art and material culture, the anthropology of the body, social outsiders, and facets of popular culture.

The Friends of God—Sufi Saints in Islam: Popular Poster Art from Pakistan (2006/OUP) and Journey to God: Sufis and Dervishes in Islam (2008/OUP).

In addition, he has curated numerous exhibitions dealing with cultures of the Muslim world.

Monday, March 21, 2011

By Maggie Morris-Knower, *Students whirl their way to wisdom* - The Lamron - Geneseo, N.Y., USA; Thursday, March 10, 2011

The ordinarily lackluster interior of the Holcomb cafetorium was invigorated this Tuesday by the two workshops taught by Sheikha Khadija Radin on the ancient Sufi practices of dance and meditation.

Participants included students, faculty and local area residents. All in attendance enjoyed the eye-opening experience of a lesson that combined Eastern philosophy and spinning around barefoot in circles.

Khadija began by drawing the audience members' attention to the ways that they perceive the world around them with a brief lecture on consciousness and the philosophy of Sufi meditation. She explained that everything we experience "is an immaculate conception, born out of impulses in the brain." Continuing this line of thought, she asked the group to share their own beliefs on human spirituality and experience.

After a short discussion, Khadija demonstrated the proper way to turn, starting with her arms folded across her chest, hands on her shoulders and her head bent slightly toward the floor. With small steps and gradually speeding up, she whirled her arms along with her body, never losing the grace that continuously propelled her in circles.

Finally, it was the group's turn to give it a whirl. Spreading across the floor of the cafeteria, people began to spin to the steady, carefree beat of "Clint Eastwood" by Gorillaz. Not everyone was able to keep their balance the whole time, but even those who were overcome with dizziness seemed to have enjoyed the experience.

Students and faculty alike said that although the movements may have seemed strange at first, there was a lot more to spinning in circles than could have been guessed.

"You would never think that whirling or Sufi mysticism could have any kind of practical application for college students, but it definitely does," said senior Garrett Burger after Khadija led the group in a seated meditation exercise aimed at alleviating anxiety. Sociology professor Joanna Kirk said that she planned to start incorporating stress-relieving breathing exercises into her exams.

Khadija commented on the perception that sticking to a dance career is impractical, saying, "I'd like a nickel for every little girl who says they're going to be a dancer when they grow up." She said she would have lost that wager had she been betting on her own chances of sticking with dance.

After studying dance at The Juilliard School and working as a choreographer and modern dance teacher, Khadija moved to an ashram in San Francisco where she began to practice meditation under the guidance of Swami Muktananda. It was while living there that her life changed suddenly for the second time upon being introduced to Sufism at a memorial for a prominent teacher.

The journey since her initial encounter with Sufi mysticism has taken Khadija all over the world, from Israel to India, Palestine to Turkey and eventually to upstate New York, where she founded the Dervish Retreat Center in 1999.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Mogadishu: Somali President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed said Thursday pro-government forces were defeating Islamist rebels, vowing that the military drive against the insurgents will go on until they are eliminated.

"The Somali forces and peacekeepers in Mogadishu are now winning the war to curb the threats of Al-Qaeda elements and their backers in Somalia," said Sharif when he visited military bases in the capital Mogadishu.

"This is a tremendous victory for which we should be proud."

In the largest coordinated offensive in years, government forces backed by African Union troops launched heavy battles in Mogadishu last month and seized control of key positions that were held by the Shebab insurgents.

Battles in the south of the country by pro-government militia also saw the rebels ousted from key towns.

"The military offensive will not stop until we eliminate the terrorist elements from our country," Sharif said.

However, in central Somalia regions, residents said Thursday the insurgents were re-arming as clashes broke out between the Shebab and the pro-government Sufi militia Ahlu Sunna wal Jamaa.

"We have attacked the biggest base of the enemy. We inflicted heavy losses on them and the fighting is still going on," said Sheikh Daud Moalim Abdulahi, an official of the Sufi militia.

The African Union in January criticised Sharif's government, whose mandate comes to an end in August, for doing little to restore stability in the war-torn country.

In the last three years, the Shebab have seized control of much of southern and central Somalia and pushed the government to a small area of the capital where it is protected by the AU forces.

Friday, March 18, 2011

An oil heiress first finds art, then whirls into a Sufi space beyond religions.

Allah has spread the earth for us as a beautiful carpet on which to prostrate. In prostration we come nearer than near and we go nearer than that. When we rise up, ready to serve, we carry the experience of prostration within us. Then we see the face of the Beloved everywhere.

— Sheikha Fariha al-Jerrahi, “The Nur Ashki Jerrahi Dervishes”

By the time the auctioneer’s gavel fell, marking the bankrupt denouement of the Dia Art Foundation’s heroic first decade, the obituaries were already being written. All the elements were in place for what Phoebe Hoban in New York magazine dubbed “Dallas in SoHo”: an elusive oil-money dynasty in turmoil; a wayward heiress; an archipelago of prime real estate sites, transformed into shrines. There were big egos and even bigger lawsuits, featuring angry titans of the American contemporary art scene, high-flying dreamers suddenly dispossessed by an arts foundation like no other.

Launched under several aliases and in near-secrecy in 1974, Dia was the well-funded lovechild of a German art visionary named Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil, a strikingly beautiful spiritual seeker and youngest scion of the Schlumberger oil fortune. De Menil’s largesse had created a kind of refuge from the speculative market in art then taking shape in New York, and a new canon of monumental, spiritually charged epics: a SoHo gallery floor buried, permanently, with black earth; a hollowed-out volcano, transformed into a science-fictional archaeo-astronomical laboratory for perceptual flight; a Promethean bed of nails poking dangerously into the desert sky, awaiting some gargantuan penitent.

Asceticism on such a scale is expensive: in 1979 alone, Dia purchased Bob Whitman’s performance space on West 19th Street; an old church in Bridgehampton for the Dan Flavin Art Institute; a castle in Garrison, New York (also for Dan Flavin); and a decommissioned army base in Marfa, Texas, for Donald Judd. The foundation spent some four million dollars on a veritable drone-abbey for La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and their teacher Pandit Pran Nath at 6 Harrison Street in TriBeCa. With an annual operating budget of $500,000 and a staff in the dozens, the “Dream House” featured sound and light displays designed to induce altered states of consciousness, living quarters, recording facilities, and a performance space. In the space of a few years, Dia had built itself an instant empire of permanent installations, one-man museums, avant-garde cloisters, and desert redoubts.

But it took even less time to come apart. Amid falling share prices and rumors of an investigation of financial improprieties by New York’s attorney general, a group of concerned de Menils had launched a coup in 1984, replacing the original board with a respectable firewall of uptown lawyers and suits, putting much of Dia’s real estate and art holdings on the auction block and sequestering Philippa’s money in a trust. The stage was set for an epic confrontation between the suits and the dreamers… that never quite came to pass. The enigmatic Friedrich quit New York, disappeared into a wandering, art-mad exile; Philippa de Menil, the embattled heiress, had long since ceased to exist. In 1980, the woman she was had become a Sufi dervish named Fariha al-Jerrahi, and when the house of Dia fell, she moved on.

Sitting across from her now, amid photographs and Turkish rugs in a rambling old bohemian mansion on a hilltop in Yonkers, I’m almost reluctant to bring up those years. It had taken me many months to persuade her to give an interview, an extended negotiation with her assistant that settled into a rhythm of deferral: yes, Fariha al-Jerrahi was open to the idea of meeting with me, but it would take time. The Sheikha, he said, was in Istanbul this month. The Sheikha was on a retreat with her dervishes. The Sheikha was out of town. I assured him that I wasn’t interested in raking the muck of Dia’s internal politics; he assured me that the Sheikha would never talk about that, in any case. Yet here we were, talking about the evening in February 1985 when one era ended and a new one mysteriously began.

It wasn’t the impending sale of the Twomblys and Warhols that she recalled to me, though, nor Judd’s enraged legal wranglings, nor even the first meeting of Dia’s new board, presided over by her conservative sister-in-law. It wasn’t the death of the Dia dream, either; it was the death in Istanbul, half a world away, of Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak, the nineteenth spiritual leader of the Halveti-Jerrahi Sufi order. What transpired that night wasn’t “Dallas in SoHo”; it was the occult lifting of the bridal veil on Sheikh Muzaffer’s soul, its absorption into God’s divine love and mercy—a moment, she said, when even the angels wept. That month also witnessed the quiet shuttering of a most unusual mosque, the Masjid al-Farah. Perhaps the only mosque in the world kitted out with Dan Flavin light installations, the space, a vast converted firehouse on Mercer Street, pushed the metaphysical tendencies of the early Dia Foundation to their logical limit: the Masjid al-Farah was a permanent installation in the heart of lower Manhattan, an avant-garde Sufi lodge for the ages.

The story, as Sheikha Fariha tells it, begins with her mother, Dominique de Menil, and a vow she made to her husband, John. The couple had begun collecting art in the 1940s at the insistence of Father Marie-Alain Couturier, a Dominican priest and “radical Christian,” in the Sheikha’s words. Couturier was a vigorous advocate for the place of modern art in the Catholic Church, the force behind a midcentury chapel-building spree in France that included famous commissions for Henri Matisse and Le Corbusier, among others. He was also the force behind the best-known legacy of the de Menils’ arts patronage, a chapel in Houston housing fourteen canvases by Mark Rothko. Stripped of explicit references to any formal religion, the de Menils envisioned the Rothko Chapel—which opened in 1971, a year after its eponymous creator’s suicide—as an ecumenical temple of the spirit, an open space for believers and nonbelievers alike.

“Truthfulness, that’s the main quality to seek in anything,” Fariha says of Couturier’s influence on her parents, “whether that’s in a spiritual path, whether that’s in art, in life: truthfulness.” As part of chapel’s inauguration, the de Menils conducted a far-ranging interfaith outreach program, visiting with representatives of the world’s major religions.

It was in that context that the de Menils attended a performance by a group of whirling dervishes from Turkey. John de Menil was impressed; shortly before his death in 1973, he made his wife promise she would bring them back. Four years later, Dominique was working out the details of an American tour with Tosun Bayrak, a Turkish translator and author. Philippa was there, and her brief conversation with Bayrak changed her life. “The Mevlevis are wonderful,” he told her, referring to the Rumi-inspired order of dervishes that had made such an impression on her father. “But you should meet my Sheikh.” Bayrak was a devoted follower of Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak, and when he said the name aloud she felt a mysterious recognition, like the fragrance of Joseph’s garment. She saw him for the first time soon after, at a traditional Turkish dhikr, a Sufi ceremony that involves chanting, singing, and movement; the name literally means “remembrance of God.” She says she felt then that she was seeing the living Christ surrounded by the apostles. When she saw the Sheikh again a few days later at the home of an American Sufi, he was singing.

It was his grave and powerfully affective voice that overwhelmed her, she says, awakening in the ear of her soul the genetic remembrance of the most beautiful sound: the word of God, asking, Alastu birabbikum, “Am I not your Lord?” In an interview from 1978, Sheikh Muzaffer extolled “the beauty of that sound, the memory of which still lives in man and in all creation, and makes us tender to beautiful sounds.”

The meeting proved fortuitous not only for Dia’s co-founder, but for Muzzafer and his order as well: the Halveti-Jerrahi Sufis’ historically close association with the arts and the Ottoman elite had found a New World analogue in this extravagant patron of the most spiritually adventurous fringe of the downtown art scene. What’s more, Sheikh Muzaffer had had a prophetic dream that the United States was poised at a kind of threshold, and that it was his destiny to bring Islam there, to a city, New York, whose social and religious multiplicity represented the crucible of a new humanity in a “space beyond religions.” It was foreordained: a veritable princess of the underground, in a grand act of renunciation, became a faqir, a pilgrim, and a stranger.

And then she died, in a manner of speaking. Every dervish, the Sheikha tells me, must “die before she dies,” shedding the external forms of identity that constitute the “lower self”—a principal source of attachment in a world characterized by impermanence, longing, and loss—and gradually realizing a kind of supreme identity with Allah, the uncreated Creator, the primum mobile, behind and beyond all names and forms. Indeed, the personal journey of each dervish is a kind of extended sacrifice of the lower self, involving ever finer shades of depersonalization, beginning with the “handtaking” ceremony that attaches her to her sheikh and proceeding through adherence to the sunnah of the prophet Mohammed—fasting during Ramadan, for example, and performing the salat or Muslim prayer five times a day—to ever more gnostic forms of selflessness, culminating in the blissful annihilation of the rational, calculating lower self and the complete harmonization of the individual heart with God’s inscrutable will.

Perhaps this oft-repeated injunction—“you must die before you die”—helps explain why convincing the Sheikha to grant me an interview was so difficult; she is long past the point of being profiled.

***

By the time she’d shed her born identity, Fariha and her co-conspirator Heiner Friedrich had presided over a far-reaching intervention in the American contemporary art scene, funding and making possible projects of a scale and ambition that the market could never support—and which, in their grappling with outsize questions of spirit, struck some outside observers as pretentious and grandiose. When you consider the way in which these two gestures were intertwined—the removal of the art-market’s constraints and the pursuit of metaphysical truth—it’s no surprise that so much of Dia’s history played out in chapels. Friedrich himself remembers conceiving the idea of Dia in 1957, a nineteen-year-old alone in the sepulchral interior of Padua’s fourteenth-century Scrovegni Chapel. Frescoed by the artist Giotto into a Dantean dream theater of the Christian cosmos, the chapel seems to inhabit its own idiosyncratic temporal order, an apocalyptic present where disparate strands of forever intersect, the circles of hell and the unblinking celestials staring down from among the stars in the ceiling’s azure midnight. Standing there overwhelmed, the pilgrim Friedrich fell into an amour fou for eternities not easily realized, for visions and schemes exalted by their very impossibility, situated outside the ordinary economy of things.

The economy of things was an especial concern for Friedrich’s Renaissance forebear Enrico Scrovegni. Scrovegni was heir to the fortune of a man whom his contemporary, the poet Dante, portrayed in The Inferno as the arch-usurer of the age, hung in a noose tied from his money-bag, tortured eternally (right next to the sodomites). According to Dante, usury is a perversion of God’s will because it runs counter to both Nature and Art: God spends, Nature spends, the artist spends, the patron spends. But the usurer hoards. A man, insofar as he calculates, buys, sells, and takes a profit, becomes a slave to things. The chapel in Padua was Scrovegni’s expiation for this sin, a sacrificial gift born of his father’s accursed interest. It was a confession, and an emulation of the divine: a gift so far beyond bounds that a kind of escape velocity was achieved. It was a gesture at once ascetic and grandiose, penitent and self-aggrandizing, austere and opulent. When Heiner Friedrich visited, he saw in the chapel a cosmic marriage of patron, artist, theme, and real estate: he saw Dia.

In 1972 Friedrich arrived in Houston, Texas, where he talked one of Dominique de Menil’s assistants, a young curator named Helen Winkler, into letting him spend the night inside the newly completed Rothko Chapel. He emerged the next day, talking excitedly in his heavily accented English, astounding Winkler with his synesthetic understanding of the paintings. Friedrich’s night alone in the chapel not only gave him a glimpse of what John Ruskin’s “fiery cross of truth” might look like on American soil, it also procured his introduction, via Winkler, to the de Menils’ youngest daughter. And with that meeting, Friedrich’s impossible Paduan daydream became, suddenly, inevitable. The Dia Art Foundation was incorporated soon after, led by Friedrich, Philippa de Menil, and Winkler.

Dia’s projects—the effable ones, that you might see in a gallery—were few in number, and the ones that de Menil preferred consisted of the sort of work that the speculators and gallery-scene critics tended to regard with a cynicism bordering on contempt. “The Emperor’s New Cat Box” was the headline of Thomas Hess’s venomous New York magazine review of Walter De Maria’s Earth Room, a 1977 installation that exemplified the uncompromising impracticality and austere, almost ascetic, formalism that typified many of Dia’s artists. Earth Room buried a Dia-funded white-cube gallery at 141 Wooster Street beneath 280,000 pounds of moist Long Island dirt, creating a breathing and humid hothouse, fecund and material, sheeted into epochal layers like a cross-section drawing in a geology textbook. Art historian Julie Sylvester, interviewed in 1996, recalled going to the opening, “thinking there would be a crowd. There was no one but this German guy in a well-cut raincoat whispering to himself, ‘I zink we must make dis permanent.’” Dia purchased a new, bigger gallery for Friedrich, designed by the architect Richard Gluckman, and Earth Room became an exhibition in perpetuity.

1977 was also the year that De Maria completed Lightning Field, perhaps the most iconic Dia project, a precisely gridded array of four hundred stainless steel rods, poking at the New Mexico sky from a rectangle of land measuring a mile on one side, a kilometer on the other. Lightning Field takes the faqir’s spiny bed into the flat plains of the western high desert and scales it exponentially upward, reimagining the artwork not as an object of detached contemplation but as a site of pilgrimage. (Complete with an elaborate and sometimes cryptic set of rules—a code of conduct limits the number of visitors to six at a time, all of whom are required to spend the night in a simple cabin on the property, eating only vegetarian meals and maintaining an atmosphere of decorum.) The air above its colossal bed of nails calls forth concentrated pulses of cosmic energy, thunderbolts, the laughter of the gods.

In its layout, the clean modernity of the kilometer collides with the storied, irrational mile, the grounded Cartesian subject with the blinding natural disaster of an infinite, immanent object, channeled and summoned like a monster from the other side of time. De Maria turns the desert wastes into a theater where such collisions are conjured, where the I, stripped down to the sensory bone, dies a kind of death.

***

The Sheikha is the first to admit that her time at Dia prepared the way for Sheikh Muzaffer’s American mission and her subsequent retreat from the world of contemporary art. But a broader cultural shift was under way, as well, exemplified by the rising New Age movement, the emergence of so-called World Music pioneered by Brian Eno and Jon Hassel, and the growing acceptance of non-western religious traditions in academia and popular culture. Primed by earnest comparative religion programs in the universities, by anthologies of Hindu and Buddhist “scripture,” and by Book of the Dead-inspired acid trips—even, finally, by the spread of yoga—many of the baby boomers in New York’s downtown loft scene fetishized “the East,” a fuzzy geographical abstraction inherited from earlier generations, as the antithesis of the materialist, technological West.

But by 1978, the year Edward Said called attention to the peculiarly self-serving history behind this way of describing the world in his book Orientalism, the East was a geographical abstraction thickly, impressively peopled with self-appointed spokesmen, wanderers, and expats—men like Muzaffer, or like Pandit Pran Nath, whose Dia-funded concerts merged trance-inducing drone electronics with virtuosic, albeit idiosyncratic, Hindustani vocal performance. It was all part of a plan, the Sheikha says, the mystical preparation for the advent of a dervish America.

No one embodied all of these currents better than Lex Hixon, an American-born one-time radio-show host and comparative religion scholar who became the spiritual head of New York’s dervish community after Sheikh Muzaffer’s death in 1985. As Sheikh Nur al-Jerrahi, Hixon forged a uniquely and explicitly American adaptation of Muzaffer’s traditional Ottoman-style Sufism, informed by his studies and his previous spiritual adventures in Tantric Hinduism (especially his devotion to the goddess Kali). By the end of his life, Hixon had also been initiated in some form or other into Tibetan Buddhism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Soto Zen, and he continued to publish translations, scholastic commentaries, and mystical and devotional texts for all of the above after becoming a dervish.

Fariha felt that Hixon’s succession as leader of the downtown Sufis was the realization of a grand cosmic plan—Sheikh Muzaffer’s dream—for a new Islam, freed from the interpretations of the black-robed “doctors of the faith” and the repressive accretions that had come to obscure its radiant essence in so many parts of the traditional Muslim world. This Islam, promulgated by what they now called the Nur Ashki Jerrahi order, was a mystical phoenix on the rise in Lower Manhattan.

It is difficult to say with any certainty which of his many religious affiliations Hixon identified with most closely; to the Nur Ashki Jerrahis he will always remain Sheikh Nur al-Anwar al-Jerrahi, the light of lights, and the Pir of the New Humanity. Of all the charismatic religious teachers Hixon had interviewed during his thirteen-year run as the host of a New Age radio show called In the Spirit—an illustrious group that included the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa, among many others—it was Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak who turned him from interviewer into lifelong devotee. In 1979, Hixon went to Istanbul and spent the month of Ramadan with Muzaffer and his dervishes in the Bayazit mosque, listening to the recitation of the Qur’an. Sitting there by his sheikh’s side, Hixon received the first of his own prophetic dervish-dreams, a vision of a cosmic Qur’an written in radiant, golden light, chanting itself in an emerald mosque beyond the highest paradise. The vision was the sign of what was to come: his initiation as a Sufi, and his transformation, in 1980, into Sheikh Nur.

“It was like a Shams and Mevlana meeting,” Sheikha Fariha told me, referencing the Sufi poet better known as Rumi and his beloved companion Shams. “And just as a man and woman coming together can produce a child, two mystics coming together can produce a whole new civilization, a spiritual civilization,” she said. In Nur and his visions, the Sheikha had discovered an avenue for transcendence more powerful than Lightning Field, and her investment in the arts, and in Dia, began to wane.

***

If Fariha’s stories—and those that attend the early years of Dia, in general—all seem to have the air of myth, it’s no accident: on the pilgrim’s road, every encounter is portentous, every mishap a blessing in disguise. The vicissitudes that beset and transform us, seemingly at random, organize themselves into webs fraught with meaning. Indeed the figure of the sacred wanderer is an important one for the Nur Ashki Jerrahis, for whom life on Earth comprises a nested, interrelated set of pilgrimages: an inner journey that leads from head to heart; more conventional travels to Istanbul and Konye, as well as the Hajj; and finally, peregrinations around an America remapped according to an idiosyncratic sacred geography, with New York City at its center—the esoteric setting for the advent of what the Sheikha calls “the New Humanity.” In this sense, Nur Ashki Jerrahi theology is continuous with the westering impulse that runs through so many American mythologies. But seen from another angle, the order’s adaptation of Turkish-style Sufi practice to its American context—the translations of the tariqat’s sacred texts, the relaxation of the formal etiquette that typifies interactions between sheikh and dervish, the explicit feminization of the order, both in terms of its hierarchy and its conception of the Creator—is typical of the way that Sufi Islam has spread for centuries.

Whether in the jungle wilds of Mughal India’s Bengal frontier, the marabouts’ desert fortresses in Western Sahara, or indeed in the Ottoman dervish lodges once common throughout the Balkans, successful Sufi teachers have always shown a genius for adapting to local linguistic, religious, and cultural contexts. Sufism—or Sufisms—tend to unsettle naive notions of religious identity, creating compelling hybrid forms of spiritual practice at once deeply Islamic and profoundly subversive of censorious desert traditions.

Not that the Nur Ashki Jerrahis feel they have anything to hide: for Sheikha Fariha and her followers, their practice is not simply a form of Islam, it is Islam itself. Stripped of its Sufi heart, she tells me, Islam ceases to be beauty, becomes something more like a prison, ossified and empty. But Islam is, in a narrow sense, ultimately a means to an end: Sheikh Nur called it “Universal Islam,” by which he meant an Islam beyond religion, a utopian “open space” in which all of the world’s sacred traditions—and all of their initiates—fall in love, dance, and dissolve into each other: the friars and the yogis and the dervishes. As he sang, “Sun that rises from the East awakens now within the West… Eagle soaring in the West, True Kaaba whirling in the West.”

***

In the brief annals of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi order, few stories are as exemplary as the tale of Sheikh Nur’s pilgrimage to another pivotal node in the sacred map of the Americas—to Tepeyac in Central Mexico, seeking permission from none other than the Virgin of Guadalupe to bring his Sufi order to that country.

According to Sheikha Amina al-Jerrahi—leader of the now-thriving Nur Ashki Jerrahi community in Mexico City—Sheikh Nur “felt guided to go to Mexico” in 1987. An ordinary religious leader may well have started his mission abroad with a visit to the municipal authorities, or perhaps sought out communities of Muslim immigrants who might be thought to be most receptive to his teachings. Sheikh Nur, as it happens, sought out a group of the indigenous circle-dancing concheros—a troupe of ritual dancers who trace their ancestry to pre-Columbian mystics—to serve as his companions, along with Sheikha Amina and Sheikha Fariha. Nur also brought along a holy relic—a hair from the beard of the prophet Mohammed. “The first thing that he did was to go to the Virgin and ask the Virgin for permission to found the tariqat, to open the order there,” Sheikha Amina said.

This wasn’t as odd as you might think. The Virgin Mary—Hazreti Maryam, as Sheikha Fariha refers to her, using a Turkish-derived Islamic honorific—and her prophetic son are objects of reverence throughout the Muslim world. Indeed, Sheikh Muzaffer himself wrote a book of meditations on the Virgin under his penname, Ashki. Sheikha Fariha refers to a saying of the prophet that promises the Virgin Mary to the prophet Mohammed as his bride, in paradise. Bringing the prophet’s relic to the shrine at Guadalupe “was like bringing the beloveds together,” she says. “And so he set her on fire with love. And she opened the way for Nureddin Jerrahi.”

But Sheikh Nur was not simply interested in the marriage of Christian and Muslim conceptions of Mary: he was drawn, too, to the mestizo character of the Virgin’s shrine at Tepeyac, where pre-Christian iconography and ritual practice survive to this day, adorned with the icon’s Catholic trappings. For Sheikh Nur, the ardent student of Hindu divinity, the Virgin of Guadalupe must have seemed like an American Devi, a super-goddess accommodating the holy continent’s diverse sources of sacred power in the folds of her raiment: the indigenous shaman’s dances, the Sufi prophet’s dreams, and the Catholic hymns of the true believer. She grants wishes to grandmothers and children, blazes with the mystical fire of love. She reveals esoteric truths. In Mexico, she is the matrix for a sense of belonging that supersedes the affective bonds of caste, color, and creed. Little wonder, then, that Sheikh Nur named the home of the order in Mexico City Mezquita Maria de la Luz—Mosque of the Luminous Mary.

In Mexico, Nur attracted new followers by holding dhikr ceremonies, by interpreting his disciples’ dreams—among the Sheikh’s titles is “dream-key to the dream-lock”—and by composing an extraordinary set of Sufi hymns in Spanish (a language he did not know) by sitting down with a set of vocabulary words and engaging in a kind of divinely inspired automatic writing.

***

“Mexico was Nur’s Medina,” Sheikha Fariha tells me over tea in her home, high above Yonkers, “just as this house was Sheikh Muzaffer’s.” She laughs. “New York was Mecca, for both of them.” Nowhere was the city’s centrality to the order more spectacularly evident than in the original home of the Masjid al-Farah at 155 Mercer Street in SoHo, a cathedral-size space that split the difference between what was already becoming known as “The Dia Look”—spare and modern—and the traditional interiors of Istanbul’s magnificent mosques. The purchase itself was controversial: the building’s new owners were contractually obligated to use the space as a home for modern dance performance, a restriction inserted by the local community board to encourage famed choreographers Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis to take possession of the property. But the Dia foundation outbid them.

Neighbors complained that the building, despite its Dan Flavin light installations and its auditorium, seemed to play host to a single style of dance, characterized by circling, planetary orbits—one whose modernity was by no means a settled matter. The Masjid al-Farah was a building whose use finally, and perhaps fatally, blurred the already fuzzy line between the sacred and the secular in Dia’s reenchanted alt-modernity. When the new Dia board assembled in 1985, the mosque was closed, and the fledgling Nur Ashki Jerrahi dervish order, led by Sheikh Nur, found its present home on West Broadway. Sometime around then, they started calling the space the Dergah al-Farah.

Nowadays the little storefront, wedged between restaurants on a busy street in TriBeCa, is practically invisible every day but Friday. On Fridays the Dergah’s spry, bushy-browed prayer-leader, Imam Faisal Rauf, would draw overflow crowds for the communal afternoon salat. They had to schedule three separate sessions in order to accommodate all of the worshippers; the small bathroom upstairs was trashed by all the ablutions. Perhaps it was his many years delivering the khutbah, or sermon, in such cramped quarters that inspired Rauf and his friend Sharif el-Gamal, a real-estate developer and Friday regular, to dream of a vastly larger space, a thirteen-floor community center, dervish lodge, and prayer space—a project they have called at various times Cordoba House and Park 51, though it is better known, inaccurately, as the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

But the relationship between the Nur Ashki Jerrahis and the masses of faithful who attend the mosque’s Friday salat is complicated. Reflecting the city’s shifting demographics, they are mostly men, and mostly migrants from Muslim countries for whom the order’s beliefs and practices—along with its leader’s gender—are heterodox in the extreme. There is little, if any, overlap between the community that gathers at sunset Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Friday visitors, a distance that clearly troubles Sheikha Fariha. Although Imam Rauf is a Sufi sheikh, too, he is not of the Nur Ashki Jerrahis: after Sheikh Muzaffer’s passing, Rauf and a handful of more conservative dervishes (including Sheikh Tosun Bayrak, the translator who introduced Philippa de Menil to his beloved sheikh so many years ago) opted not to follow Sheikh Nur. Of Rauf, the Sheikha observes, “He did not go through Nur, and that makes a big difference.”

Rauf left the Dergah al-Farah a year ago. Perhaps navigating the tiny space was too unwieldy for the busy imam, but for Sheikh Nur it was a “jewel box.” It sits like a heart, hidden away amid a city that Fariha sees as the very model for peaceful coexistence, a Noah’s ark for a world poised at the brink of catastrophe. “Look at all the religious teachers that have come here,” she says. When Sheikh Muzaffer first visited, he led a group of dervishes in Muslim prayer at the World Trade Center. Sheikh Nur liked to say that the Twin Towers were Muzaffer’s minarets, while the Empire State Building—where the former Lex Hixon had broadcast his radio interview with the Turkish mystic—was his minbar, or pulpit.

For a Nur Ashki Jerrahi dervish, the whole world is a prayer carpet; but New York is particularly sacred.

When I raise the question of 9/11 and “ground zero,” Fariha becomes passionate. She finds it especially appalling that commercial spaces—rental properties and real estate—are being built at the site. “It is absolutely holy ground! But it isn’t being treated as holy ground.” There are competing sacred geographies at work, to be sure, but even more, there are radically different notions of what we owe to the dead. Dia’s beautiful dervish-founder says the answer is simple: we owe them our love, and a sacrifice.

***

I joined the dervishes and their Sheikha recently for the Tuesday evening meshq ceremony. It’s a low-key affair, unlike events held there on Thursdays. Everyone arrived late—“dervish standard time,” someone quipped—and there was a lot of chitchat and hugging going around. The members of the order are a heterogeneous group, a happy mix of ages and backgrounds, and they all seemed perfectly content at the notion of an evening together, singing Sheikh Nur’s translations of the Turkish hymns that the dervishes and their Sheikha revere as an extension of the Qur’an itself. One of them leads the salat, chanting the call to prayer from the front of the room, first in Arabic, then in Sheikh Nur’s English:

Supreme Reality is always greater than any conceptionI witness that there is no reality apart from Supreme RealityI witness that Mohammed is an authentic Messenger of Supreme RealityCome to salatCome to the highest spiritual realizationAllah is always greaterNothing exists apart from Allah.

Later, during a break in the singing, the dervishes—who number around ten this evening—ask Fariha a few questions. One of them, a young Turkish man, asks her about the time Sheikh Muzaffer made her a Sheikha, alongside Sheikh Nur. If that all happened in 1980, he says, then this year represents the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the order.

“That’s true!” I think, “maybe even a fine hook for the essay,” and look over to see her, laughing at the thought.

This piece originally appeared in Bidoun, a quarterly magazine about art and culture in the Middle East.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

By Shana Maria Verghis, *‘Your energy must be directed in one place’* - The Pioneer - India; Friday, March 11, 2011

Satinder Sartaaj spends more time in libraries and writing lyrics for songs he sings, inspired by Sufi poets and limiting concerts to a handful. The Punjabi vocalist tells his career choices and decision to keep Bollywood offers at bay were guided by his level of inner satisfaction

Ranjeev and Parminder Singh Sidhu are an Indian couple working at Manchester University’s Department of Spiritual Studies. Recently, the duo spent about 25 days with Hoshiarpur-born Sufi singer Satinder Sartaaj, studying, as Satinder put it, “my state of mind, aura and other things, “when he was touring with his band. Their 100-something pages of research was published in the form of a book, accompanying one of his latest albums, Sai, which comes with a meditation CD.

Sai contains a single of the same name that is in the form of an ardaas or a request to God. Sartaaj is not keen to portray himself as some highly evolved spiritual soul, divinely inspired to write the lyrics to Sai, which are in chaste Punjabi. Nor does he fill your imagination with stories about the song coming to him in, say, a flash of light that left him in a trance or some such thing. The truth is, he was simply crossing in his house to the music room, when the first line, Koi Ali aakey, koi Wali aakhey (Some say Ali, some say Wali...) drifted into his consciousess. “I sing this at the beginning of my performance for blessings to give a good performance. That is all,” he said, keeping it simple.

The words to Sai invoke divine mercy and love, in the Sufi tradition, which Sidhu is a student of. He said, “The Sidhus spent a lot of time asking me questions. They know much that I don’t.” Sartaaj himself has sung from class three, and was drawn to Sufi music. He has an MS in music and PhD in Sufi music. He also has degrees in Urdu and Sanskrit and got a gold medal in Persian language.

For six years, he taught at Punjab University’s, Department of Music. “Most of the time I was in the library reading and studying. I have written about 500 songs.” Singh’s oeuvre covers classical poets like Rumi and Bulleh Shah. But his personal favourite is Babu Rajab Ali (1894-1979), an expert in a loud, stretched out way of singing, without instruments accompanying, called Kavishri.

“Babu Rajab Ali writes about everyday life, explained Sartaaj, “In the style called Bahaatar kilian chind, which is a form of folk poetry that is typically written in 72 stanzas.” He accompanies the instrument with his harmonium. The 31-year-old, who composed his first album in 2002, and found no takers for it till 2009, told us with some good humour that, “Realistically, the taste of the masses was for bhangra and hip-hop. It is not surprising no one promoted my album.”

Nevertheless, he saw attendance at his concerts grow from “50-100 to about 45,000 at a show I had in Kapurthala.” The turning point was a tour in Canada that “gave me exposure overseas and had 60 sold-out shows.” Now better known, he has been asked to act and sing in movies, but prefers to “spend 60-70 per cent of time on riyaaz, studies and family.” He said this ensures “performance does not suffer. If you take too many concerts, you stress your vocal chords and the show will be poor.”

Since his first album Ibadat, he has released two more, taking painstaking attention with the lyrics. “What keeps me going is the internal satisfaction I get. Not commercialism. I do what I feel and don’t go according to popular tastes. This means that I have my own particular kind of audience.”

Sartaaj explained, “It was during my Bachelors of Music, that I read Sufi stuff and decided to do my higher education in the subject. I was inclined that way from my childhood, though I wasn’t singing Sufi music then but other prayer songs, like the shabad kirtan. When I learnt Persian and did my PhD, I did a few mehfils from 2001. I try to maintain some decorum. So we don’t do parties and marriages.” All his poems, he added, “Do have a message. When its not about God, there is a social message. Like saving the trees. Or, I write about female foeticide.” He added that, “One of my songs was inspired by a little girl, picking sticks for firewood whom I had seen during a picnic excursion.”

Before he writes, he does a short meditation, “to get concentration.” He said, “I began this during my PhD, when I was going through many books and earlier had a problem with focussing. It’s also useful when you perform sitting, three-four hours non-stop and need to be attentive, to give your best. Your whole energy must be directed in one place, by attuning body and mind.” He concluded, “When words to something like the ardaas come, it is a gift of God. People say Saraswati aayi hain. It is momentary inspiration. Not a continuous stream. And I try to do something good with it. Sufism to me is something that gives one internal satisfaction. Be it writing or performing. People urged me for years to change my style, but I am happy with it. As for religion, I think that is a private thing.”

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

"The only real testimony we have on it was actually from Sheikh Kabbani, who was a Muslim leader during the Clinton Administration, he testified, this is back in 1999 and 2000, before the State Department that he thought over 80 percent of the mosques in this country are controlled by radical Imams. Certainly from what I've seen and dealings I've had, that number seems accurate."--Rep. Peter King, Jan. 24, 2011

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, plans to hold controversial hearings Thursday on Islamic radicalism. King jokes that these hearings may make him famous "for a week," but he has already become well known for an assertion he once made that "80 to 85 percent" of the mosques in the United States are controlled by radical imams.

King now dismisses the comment as inconsequential, saying in an interview that he has no idea if the estimate is correct.

"I don't think it matters that much" because, according to Islamic leaders King said he has spoken with, imams do not have as much influence among the faithful as do priests or rabbis and because a relatively small percentage of American Muslims attend mosques.

"This is not that important to me," he said, adding: "I do think there is an inordinate amount of radical influence in mosques."

King added that he believes he made this comment on his own only once, and since then has simply responded to questions when interviewers raise it, such as in the quote above, when Raymond Arroyo, a guest host on radio's "Laura Ingraham Show," brought it up.

Nevertheless, this has become one of the most recognizable quotes associated with King. It has been repeated often in news reports about the upcoming hearings, so a casual listener might think there is a basis in fact. Let's look at the roots of this figure.

The Facts

This all started with a State Department forum in early 1999 on Islamic extremism that attracted virtually no media attention. That is, until a few months later, when virtually every major Muslim organization in the United States issued a joint statement condemning the remarks by Sheikh Hisham Kabbani as "unsubstantiated allegations that could have a profoundly negative impact on ordinary American Muslims."

With the passage of 12 years, Kabbani's comments -- made more than two years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- look both remarkably prescient and somewhat off the wall.

Kabbani, who practices Sufism, warned that "there are 5000 suicide bombers being trained by [Osama] bin Laden in Afghanistan who are ready to move to any part of the world and explode themselves."

But Kabbani also said that bin Laden's organization had been "able to buy more than 20 atomic nuclear heads from some of the mafia in the ex-Soviet Union, in the republics of the ex-Soviet Union, and they traded it for $30 million and 2 tons of opium." He added that they were breaking up "these atomic warheads into smaller partitions, like small chips, to be put in any suitcase."

As part of this discourse, Kabbani said that "Muslims, in general, are peace-loving and tolerant" but that 80 percent of the mosques in the United States are "being run by the extremist ideology, but not acting as a militant movement."

Kabbani offered no evidence to support this assertion and has provided little evidence since. In 2001, he told The New York Times that he had visited 114 mosques in the United States and "ninety of them were mostly exposed, and I say exposed, to extreme or radical ideology" -- through speeches, books and board members. "He said that a telltale sign of an extremist mosque was a focus on the Palestinian struggle," the Times reported.

In the interview, King said he did not rely just on Kabbani's statement but also on testimony before a Senate panel in 2003 by Stephen Schwartz, a Muslim convert who at the time was affiliated with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Schwartz has been a prominent opponent of Wahhabi Islam -- a strict sect of Islam described by some as extremist -- and he testified, "Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques -- out of a total ranging between an official estimate of 1,200 and an unofficial figure of 4-6,000 -- are under Wahhabi control."

Schwartz did not identify these community leaders, though before this appearance he had previously attributed this estimate to Kabbani's statement at the State Department. In an email, he said he "heard it from Kabbani but also heard it from the leaders of the main Shia mosques in the U.S." and that having attended services in the U.S. and other Western countries he believes "Sunni mosques in the U.S. are still, in 2011, overwhelmingly dominated by fundamentalists." He added: "Fixing a quantitative level is difficult but 75-80 percent still seems right to me."

Meanwhile, there have been efforts to actually measure the sentiment in American mosques.

University of Kentucky professor Ihsan Bagby in 2004 published a study of Detroit mosques that concluded that approximately 93 percent of mosque participants endorse both community and political involvement and more than 87 percent of mosque leaders support participation in the political process. Most were registered to vote and "because of these moderate views, mosque participants cannot be described as isolationists, rejecters of American society or extremists." (Some conservatives have noted that the study also found strong support for universal health care, affirmative action and Islamic law in Muslim-majority nations, as well as deep concern about immorality in the United States.)

King said he was unaware of the Detroit study.

The Pinocchio Test

The persistence of this "80 percent" statistic is mystifying. It is based largely on a single observation by one Muslim cleric 12 years ago, who has offered no evidence to make his claim. The one other possible source is the personal observations of Schwartz but as far as we can tell it has not been confirmed by any documented study.

The Fact Checker was inclined to award King quite a few Pinocchios before he came to the phone and essentially took it back. But he has a responsibility to clear the air and say that, in the absence of other evidence, he no longer thinks this 12-year-old "fact" has any relevance. He says that he was not planning to bring up this statistic in his hearing, but the very public platform he has Thursday morning would be a good place to clear the air.

In the quote above, King correctly noted that there was a single source and that it dates back to 1999. But then he went on to say the "number seems accurate," lending credence to the figure and giving a misleading impression that there is more to back it up.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

By Ivan Hewett, *Salisbury International Arts Festival: Fanfare for the common ground* - The Telegraph - London, UK; Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Christianity and Islam meet in a new oratorio written for the city’s cathedral. Hallelujah, says Ivan Hewett.

'The lamps are different but the light is one.” So wrote the great Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi, expressing the idea that all religions are really one and that praise offered to one deity praises all. It’s the guiding idea behind a new work, best described as a multi-faith oratorio, which will be unveiled at Salisbury International Festival.

Maria Bota, the festival’s director, has this year chosen “Bridges” as her theme – bridges between genres, cultures and religions. The great medieval cathedral of Salisbury is always at the centre of the festival, and so a work which threw a bridge between Christianity and another great world religion seemed essential.

By a happy coincidence, it turns out that Rumi was embarking on his life as poet and philosopher at the same time as the foundation stone of the medieval cathedral of Salisbury was being laid, in 1240. That initial idea has now blossomed into a 75-minute work entitled Where Two Worlds Touch, involving a professional choir of 70, a community choir of 130, four vocal soloists, a brass quintet, and a percussionist.

It’s the brainchild of author and storyteller Ashley Holland, who also chose the texts, which are spread across Christian and Islamic mystical sources. Musically it’s the joint creation of Howard Moody and Helen Chadwick, two composers from very different backgrounds.

For Moody, a keyboard player who’s worked with top-flight performers of Baroque music like John Eliot Gardiner and jazz musicians including John Surman, the piece was a homecoming. “I grew up as a chorister in Salisbury Cathedral, so this project is special to me,” he says. “The overriding factor in this piece was the cathedral and its fabulous acoustic, which I wanted to celebrate.”

Chadwick comes at the project having sat at the feet of traditional singers in Ghana and Corsica, and worked in community opera. “The solo voice is my focus,” she says, “although I’m interested in choral singing, too. There’s a tradition of Gaelic psalm-singing on the Isle of Lewis which to me seems exactly right for this big space, as it’s a way of creating polyphony without having to be exact about the rhythmic co-ordination.”

And the poetry? “I’ve loved Rumi’s poetry for years, so I’m setting most of those, though I’ve also bagged a line from St John of the Cross that I love.”

While Chadwick is setting her share of the texts in English, Moody is setting his in the original. “I’m fascinated by the music of each language,” he says, “and also by the way the language affects the meaning. For example in Hebrew there’s no conditional tense, which helps to explain why [the] Jewish belief system is so rooted in certainty. In Arabic the phrase 'peace process’ is hard to translate because there are so many ways of saying 'peace’.”

The songs are almost all written, so now comes the business of knitting them together. “We’re having a trial run-through to see if the order works,” Chadwick says. “That’s when we’ll find out if there are any odd key shifts we need to change.”

The composers also face another logistical challenge, to do with the way the physical location of the performers changes during the course of the piece. “There’s a symbolic coming together of the two choirs,” Moody says, “which reflects the idea of the meeting of two traditions. At the beginning the professional choir is on the platform and the community choir is at the back, but by the end they’ve come together.”

In a world where tensions between Christian and Muslim are becoming more acute, this admirable attempt to illuminate the common ground between two faiths, is much to be welcomed.

‘Mela Shalimar Ka’ is a decades old poem by the late Ghulam Mustafa Tabbassum, known as Sufi Tabbassum, which still echoes in the mind of those belonging to the generation of the 60s and 70s since its about the golden days of the Mela Chiraghan (Festival of Lamps), also known as Mela Shalimar Kaí which started on Friday here in the provincial metropolis.

The Mela Chiraghan is a jewel in the crown of the culture of Punjab, the Land of Five Rivers, the land of peace, tranquillity, love, open-heartedness and hospitality that it was just a few decades back.

The Mela Chiraghan has been associated with the great Sufi saint, poet, revolutionary and a crusader of human freedom and rights, Shah Hussain, who is buried in Baghbanpura, near Shalimar Bagh.

People of the locality, the adjacent and nearby villages and from all every nook and corner of the province come over to the great Sufi saint's shrine to light a lamp on his grave only to get their wishes fulfilled.

Mela Chiraghan (Festival of Lights) or Mela Shalimar Ka is a three-day annual festival to mark the Urs of Shah Hussain. The festival used to take place in the Shalimar Gardens also until President Ayub Khan ordered against it in 1958. The festival used to be the largest in the whole Punjab, second to Basant. It is still one of grand events in the provincial capital and hundreds of thousands of devotees from all over the country take part in the festivity.

Shah Hussain, also called the poet of love, was born in 1538 AD. He was a radical thinker. His poetry has a spellbinding effect on the listeners at the shrine illuminated by thousands of lamps and candles. ‘Mai Nae Main Kinon Aakhan,’ ‘Mahi Mahi Kookdi’, ‘Rabba Meray Hal Da Mehram Toon’, ‘Mandi Han Kay Changi Han, Sahab Teri Bandi Han’ and ‘Mein Vi Jana Jhok Ranjhan Di Nal Meray Koi Challay’ are among some of his famous Kafees.

He was the first Punjabi Sufi poet whose writings were a mixture of five languages, i.e. Punjabi, Pothohari, Hindi, Persian and Arabic. His Kafees are so simple that one can understand his message without any difficulty.

‘Knowing God by knowing ourselves’ is the main theme of his poetry.

His work is romantic and has all symbols of rich romantic tradition. Shah Hussainís Kafees have been sung by lovers of Sufi poetry for centuries. His poetry will continue to mesmerise the next generations with its message of peace and love.

Dr Mohan Singh Diwana collected 163 of Shah Hussainís Kafees and according to his findings, Shah Hussain was a true scholar and intellectual. Some researchers wrote that Guru Nanak was the first poet who wrote Kafees in Punjabi language but, the Kafees of Shah Hussain, Bulleh Shah, Sachal Sarmast, Khawaja Ghulam Farid and Pir Qutab Ali Shah are gems of the Punjabi literature.

Devotees attribute a number of Karamaat (miracles) to Shah Hussain. One may or may not believe them, but no one can deny the literary genius of the saint. Even today, his poetry attracts a great audience.

The marble-domed memorial of the Sufi poet at Baghbanpura, near the Shalimar Gardens, does not appear to be old. It is said that after his death in 1599 AD, Shah Hussain was buried at Shahdara, on the western bank of the Ravi, but a few years later, the tomb was swept away by a flood. Then, it was shifted to its present site.

Besides the grave of Shah Hussain under the same dome, there is also a grave of Madhu Lal, a son of a Hindu Brahmin, with whom the saint was deeply attached. Therefore, a large number of Hindus also come to attend his Urs.

During the festival, drummers perform at the shrine and youths and women dance to a deafening beat. The festival attracts a large number of artistes who sing his Kafees and dance to the drums. Locals said the shrine was a focal point for celebrating Basant before the partition.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh used to celebrate Basant at the tomb. Once, Maharaja gave robes of honour to all his cabinet members and ordered them to reach the tomb in Basanti dresses. The infantry was ordered to dress in the same colour and stand on both sides of the road from the Lahore Fort to the Shah Hussainís tomb.

One of the attractions of the festival is its bazaar. In the past, it was a major point of shopping, but presently it has been reduced to the sale of general goods, toys, edibles, garments and bangles.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Anita Singhvi has been invited to sing at the Urs of Nizamuddin Auliya. She tells Veenu Sandhu about her life in music.

The air is thick with the fragrance of roses. Narrow alleyways lined with colourful shops that sell perfumes or offerings to be made at the shrine of Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya lead to the dargah where the saint and his disciple, Sufi mystic Amir Khusrau, have been resting for centuries.

Close by, at Khwaja Hall, a gathering is in place. The hall is filled with men, many of whom are wearing four-cornered bright yellow caps (kulah), the kind Nizamuddin Auliya and his disciples used to wear. There is only a handful of women in this room, and they all sit in one corner.

Facing them, at the far end, are the speakers, who, like everybody else, are seated on the floor. Among them is a woman wearing a saree of as bright a yellow as the caps. “That,” she later says, “was a coincidence.”

Anita Singhvi, ghazal and Sufi singer, makes an unusual picture in this setting. But she looks comfortable, and happy. In a sense, she’s in the world which has given her music — she used to confine herself to Hindustani classical — a new meaning.

Singhvi has been invited because she is to be felicitated by Khwaja Hasan Sani Nizami, the spiritual leader of the Nizamuddin Dargah in Delhi, for her voice, which celebrates the music of Sufi saints in both Urdu and Persian. The Khwaja presents her with a copy of the Qur’an in Hindi. The timing, Singhvi feels, could not have been more auspicious. It is the 707th Urs, or death anniversary, of Khawaja Nizamuddin Auliya, a time when the devout from across the city and elsewhere come to this shrine to be blessed.

Urs literally means “wedding”, which the Sufi saints referred to as a union with the beloved (the divine) after death. During this Urs, Singhvi has been invited to perform at the dargah. It is a rare honour, because she is a woman and a non-Muslim. But Khwaja Hasan, speaking to the gathering, says: “Khwateen ko gaane ki koi pabandhi nahin hai” (“Women are not prohibited from singing”).

He narrates a story to drive the message home, of a time when women were stopped from singing and the result was that for 300 years, “Dilli chiragh-heen rahi” (“Delhi remained in the dark”). Sufism, he adds, is all-embracing.

Wherever the Sufi saints went, they learnt the language of that place and made it part of their poetry, says Khwaja Hasan.

Singhvi, who was born in Jodhpur and was married at the age of 18 to Abhishek Manu Singhvi, now a Congress leader, says she never imagined that her journey would lead her to sing the words of poets like Ghalib, Khusrau, Faiz, Momin, Meer, Daag and Rumi.

“When I got married at a young age, my guru in Jodhpur made me pledge that I would never give up singing,” she says. She kept her promise. Now, mornings are reserved for riyaz (practice), though the evenings are mostly busy. “In the evening my house will be full of politicians who will accompany my husband, or else it will turn into a studio with television channels coming to interview him on one issue or the other,” she says.

While she would rather be left with her music and books, she says she has also learnt to somehow balance these two aspects of her life — politics and the thirst for Sufism.

The turning point in her life came when she heard Begum Akhtar. The more she listened to her, the deeper she was drawn into Urdu and Persian poetry. More than 250 concerts and five albums later, Singhvi says she is finally getting to understand the depth of the language and the poetry. She has learnt to read, write and speak both Urdu and Persian.

Once, at Jamia Millia Islamia, where she performs regularly, she sang Persian compositions for two and a half hours. In her second album, Sada-e-Sufi by Saregama India (the first, Naqsh-e-Noor, and fourth, Tajalli, were also from Saregama) three out of nine songs are in Persian. A translation, she felt, would rob them of their meaning and depth.

Another album, Zah-e-Naseen, produced by Big Music, took shape after composer Khayyam and his wife Jagjit Kaur heard Singhvi sing Begum Akhtar’s ghazals. In the album, Khayyam, who has composed music for her, says, “Her voice is fresh and unusual... Inko Urdu aur Farsi se junoon ki had tak mohabbat hai” (“She is obsessively passionate about Urdu and Persian”).

Singhvi says she would rather perform at live concerts, where singing fine poetry that reaches out to the audience gives her a joy like no other. She’s performed, among other places, in West Asia, Europe, America, Pakistan (“where the audience left me overwhelmed”), back home in Jodhpur, and in California, which was one of the longest performances, close to four hours.

Singhvi, who has a heavy bass voice, has also performed often at Ghalib Academy and at the Milad functions (the Prophet’s birthday) at Jamia University. In 2007, she received the Mallika-e-Tarannum (queen of melody) award from the Husn Ara Trust.

Trained in the Gwalior Gharana, Singhvi has gone from singing ghazals and dadra to Sufiana kalam. The range has equipped her to make her own compositions, where she at times adds Meera and Kabir to Ghalib.

“In a way, my condition is like Meera’s,” she says. “One part of me wants to go out and visit every dargah, listen to the philosophers, soak in as much beauty as there is in Urdu and Persian poetry as possible. But another part of me holds me back.”

In the midst of this, she says, she has created an atmosphere around her where Sufism coexists in harmony with politics.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

By Jan Khaskheli, *Govt plans to engage shrines in fight against extremism* - The News International - Karachi, Pakistan; Friday, March 25, 2011

The government in Sindh has adopted a strategy to convince the caretakers of the shrines of Sufi saints to help stop the fresh wave of extremism in the province, believing they (caretakers) have influence over 85 percent of the population and may play a key role in helping the government to deal with the crisis.

These views were expressed by Senior Minister Pir Mazharul Haq on the occasion of the Sakhi Lal Shahbaz Qalandar Sufi Conference held at an auditorium in Sehwan.

The conference was organised by the Jamshoro district government and Jamaat Saleheen, Gulistan Bahu Welfare Trust International, Punjab.

The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) would follow the Sufi’s discourse to stop the wave of extremism in Sindh, he added.

Mazhar announced organising international Sufi conferences annually at Sehwan to promote Sufism. Ministers from Sindh and Balochistan, including Syed Murad Ali Shah, Ayaz Soomro, Taj Haider, Sadiq Umrani and Ali Madad Jotak, as well as PPP leaders, writers and caretakers of shrines of Sufi saints hailing from Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan attended the conference.

Backing the idea floated by Sakhi Khalid Sultan Al-Qadri, caretaker of Shaikh Sultan Bahu, Mazhar said the government would organise such gatherings in all parts of the province to promote peace, tolerance and harmony. “People of Sindh for long have been the followers of Sufi saints. They do not believe in hatred and extremism. The PPP is the party of Sufis and we will establish the centre of Sufis at the shrine of Qalandar Lal Shahbaz in Sehwan.”

The senior minister stated that the PPP had come to power because it had the blessing of Sufi saints and would face all the visible challenges with their help. He said that the Sindh government would discuss the idea of forming a Sufi council, a separate forum to organise Sufis by establishing its offices at local, district and provincial levels to promote Sufism in order to counter the wave of extremism.

He said Sufi scholars would be invited from all over the world to guild the people in Pakistan, who, he said, were being misguided by certain elements.

Sakhi Khalid Sultan, who was presiding over the event, said that they had come there to promote peaceful ideas among the people. He appealed to the participants to spread the message of tolerance and peace in society.

“We are not from ‘barud walas’ (bombers), but of ‘Darud walas’. Faqirs (saints) are not bombers but preachers of peace and harmony,” he said, adding that the Sufi saints spread the message of love and fought evil forces.

“People want to live peacefully and do not believe in extremism.” Sultan condemned elements targeting shrines in the country, and vowed to fight these subversive elements by spreading the teachings of Sufi saints.

Minister Sadiq Umrani from Balochistan said that their party had always served Sufi saints. He appealed to the followers of Sufi saints to come together to fight evils destabilising the nation and bringing a bad name to the country.

Faqir Aijaz Ali, a Sufi scholar and organiser of the conference, said that Sufis always preached the message of peace. They had always worked for the unity among humanity. This conference aimed to see the land of Sindh like it was in the past, he added.

Monday, March 28, 2011

His voice lifts your soul and his music reverberates through your spirit.

Not one to bow down to the rules of the industry, the talented Kailash Kher has remained true to himself throughout his journey as a musician. Tasting astounding success with his "Allah ke Bande" in 2002, Kailash has struck the right balance between independent music and filmy naach-gana. In Chennai for the ‘Unplugged’ concert for Fever Entertainment, Kailash and his band Kailasa, will thrill the city with their unique sounds.

Speaking to Deccan Chronicle about his fans in Chennai, Kailash says, “Chennai’s audience is culturally inclined and intellectually motivated. We will enthrall them with a repertoire that has been appreciated by diverse audiences. We plan to sing hit numbers from our albums and a couple of popular film songs too.”

Clearly, Kailash is no stranger to the city having visited here often, but mostly on work. Talking about his colleagues in Kollywood, Kailash says, “I have sung for most composers in the south and have enjoyed working with all of them.” But a certain young composer has his special regard. “I get along very well with GV Prakash. He is very young and talented. He gave me my first hit in Tamil cinema with "Veyilodu Vilaiyadi" at the start of his career,” he gushes.

The singer also likes to pay his good friend A.R. Rahman a visit every time he is in town. Kailash speaks fondly of Rahman’s mother. “I always make time to stop by Rahman’s house and have food made by his mother. Amma always serves me with love and whatever she makes is very special.”

Kailash’s favourite among his own hits are "Saiyyan", "Teri Deewani" and "Aaj Mere Piya Ghar Aavenge". And, he promises to live up to his motto of promoting non-film music with his band ‘Kailasa’, this Sunday at Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Roa Concert Hall in Harrington Road.

Very few poets get published, let alone in the International Herald Tribune when they are 12 years old. It is somewhat amusing then, and perhaps a mark of the humbleness of poet Manav Sachdeva, SIPA ’03, that he does not remember the incident.

What he does remember is that his father had heard from teachers at school that Sachdeva’s handwriting was “horrific” and made him practice lines. Sachdeva smiled and said, “I found it oppressively boring, so somehow I started playing with words.” A career in poetry began and now “The Sufi’s Garland,” Sachdeva’s first collection of poems, will officially release this Friday, March 25, from Roman Books.

“The Sufi’s Garland,” which chronicles the journey of a nomadic fakir, has emotional and spiritual undertones reminiscent of the work of 18th-century American greats like Emily Dickinson.Yet poetry is not Sachdeva’s primary profession: he is a consultant to the United Nations. His two job roles, that of poet and that of humanitarian, “are not interrelated in a perfect sense,” Sachdeva said, but “they inform one another.”

At the School of International and Public Affairs , Sachdeva concentrated in both poetry and politics. “I have always felt that poets have an impact on policy,” Sachdeva said, adding that poets can “write lines to inspire nations, whether it be revolution or oppression, or to inspire minorities of the population.”

“The Sufi’s Garland” has been 15 years in the making. Sachdeva began writing the now-published manuscript long before he came to Columbia for graduate school. Yet it was here in New York that he began to consider his poetry more deeply, after talking to renowned poets at the School of the Arts like Alice Quinn, an adjunct professor in the writing division.

Sachdeva’s poems, in fragments and pieces of various languages ranging from English to Hindi to Pubjabi, were strong in content, but needed to be edited and combined to form a whole.The poems that survived the revision process are strikingly all in English, but not without explanation from their author. Sachdeva sent his original, multi-lingual manuscript out to American publishers but faced a series of rejections. “I was making a mistake of sending to American publishers in different languages, who couldn’t understand why,” Sachdeva said.

Sachdeva has found success writing in English but still has plans to print a future collection in his native languages. For now, he is content to bask in the satisfaction of being a newly published author.

“The Sufi’s Garland,” while literally following the journey of a nomad, is also a journey within Sachdeva’s own mind. “In a way, this was a reckoning to accept different kinds of philosophies, and different hearts, and different ways to receive the world,” Sachdeva said. “I was getting afraid of how many places my mind was going, and I reached a point where I accepted that the mind is an uncontainable act ... It is alright not to judge the mind.” “The Sufi’s Garland” is an acceptance of that belief.

When asked what he would like the reader to take away from his poetry, Sachdeva recalled a song about pilgrimage. “It’s sort of what I would like them [the readers] to walk away with, to try to keep this as a journey to the beloved,” he said. “It’s sort of as if you were walking, that part of your own spirit or life, but that love has no destination. It is the destination itself. You have to walk with love itself.” This is what Sachdeva seems to mimic in his own life, whether it be at the U.N. or through his poetry—there is no destination, but only a path to walk.

Most of us studied Kabir’s dohas in school, and then forgot them soon after. But now the soon-to-be-launched Azim Premji University plans to include Kabir’s dohas in its post-graduate courses on education, development and teacher education.

It was a chance meeting with Shabnam Virmani that convinced Anurag Behar, co-CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation, of the pedagogic potential of Kabir’s dohas — his couplets expounding home truths and preaching religious harmony. Virmani leads the Kabir Project which explores how the 15th century mystic poet continues to survive in diverse social, political, religious and spiritual spaces in India and parts of Pakistan.

Also, the Kabir Project is now supported by Wipro Applying Thought in Schools and will look at how Kabir can be taught in more dynamic ways in schools, including those supported by the Azim Premji Foundation in rural and urban areas.

A documentary film-maker, 45-year-old Virmani is artist in residence at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. She’s also co-founder of the Drishti Media Arts and Human Rights collective, where she directed several documentaries in partnership with grassroots women’s groups.

Virmani’s tryst with Kabir began in 2002. She was living in Ahmedabad then, and saw first hand the anti-Muslim riots that followed the Godhra carnage. Kabir seemed to call out to her — “Sadho, dekho jag baurana!” (Oh seekers, see the world’s gone mad!). “I instinctively felt that this man was saying what I felt,” Virmani says. In 2003, she set off, camera in hand, travelling all over, meeting people who sang, loved, quoted, revered and interpreted Kabir for a living.

Seven years down the line, some of these experiences have found their way into four documentary films, several music CDs and books. Now, she and her team are working on a virtual encylopaedia of Kabir and other mystic poets, incorporating meanings of these poems through text, audio and video clips of songs, reflections, art works and conversations.

The Ford Foundation has support the Kabir Project with three grants of roughly Rs 2.5 crore [USD 548.000.-], covering a period of 10 years from 2003-2013.

Shabnam says, she had set out thinking she would preach Kabir to the “violent, misguided ones out there”. But soon Kabir started “speaking to me...showing me the fissures in my own mind, the violence (gross or subtle) and the dishonesties I am capable of when I construct and defend my ego”.

In 2003, she spent three days in Damakheda village in Chhattisgarh, amidst followers of the Dharamdasi Kabir Panth sect at their annual chauka aarti festival. “I was able to see the divisiveness of religion, its unholy nexus with politics and commerce, the distortions and exploitation in the practice of ritual. But I was also moved to see the faith and spirit with which people gathered there. I began to recognise the power and attraction rituals can hold.”

This uneasy tension became the underlying quest of her film Kabira Khada Bazaar Mein: Journeys with Sacred and Secular Kabir. It follows the life of Prahlad Tipanya, a folk singer and activist of the secular group Eklavya, who decided to join the Kabir Panth as a mahant (cleric). The film tracks the opposing pulls of the individual and the collective, the spiritual and the social, as Tipanya tries to translate the ideas of Kabir into his life.

Shabnam now aims to make the Kabir Project self-sustaining and support the folk artistes and oral traditions which keep Kabir alive. Part of the proceeds from the films and audio CDs, thus, have been used for this purpose.

In March 2010, she organised the first Malwa Kabir Yatra. The nine-day yatra started from Luniyakhedi village, Tipanya’s home, and travelled through villages and large cities such as Ujjain and Indore in eight districts, spreading the message of Kabir through live music and film screenings.

It brought together folk singers, activists, artists, students with rural audiences ranging from 1,000 to 13,000, putting on the same platform the many different Kabir oral traditions.

It gave rural audiences in Malwa a chance to appreciate for the first time the spirit of Kabir in Kutchi, Gujarati and Marwari folk music, through the voices of Mooralala Marwada, Hemant Chauhan and Mukhtiyar Ali.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

A good number of devotees from all walks of life thronged the Dargah (mosque) on Linghi Chetty Street [Chennai] for the 64th Urs of Qutubul Akhtab Hazrath Hafiz Syed Habib Mohammed Hasan Moulana Khadiri Baghdadi (Raz), the 31st descendant of Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) and the 19th descendant of Hazrat Ghouse-ul-Aazam Dastageer (Raz), on Friday night (March 11).

The Sufi saint, who was born in Baghdad came to India in the early 20th century with his father Hazrath Syed Mohammed Rasheed Maulana Baghdadi Khadiri (Raz), to propagate Sufism. Trained by Colombo's patron saint Hazrath Syed Saleh Maulana Madani (Raz), the Hazrath became a Qutub, which is the highest order in Islamic spiritualism.

Night-long prayerThe saint, revered by the people of India in general and the people of Hyderabad and Chennai in particular, chose Mannady as his final resting place. That he is still remembered and venerated could be seen from the congregation which assembled for the occasion. H. Habibullah Shah, Sajjad-e-Nasheen and Muthavalli of the dargah led the night-long prayers which commenced with Zikhr. Poems, hymns and salutations were also recited on the occasion.

The Bijli Brothers – Afzal, Tahir, Ameen and Yousuf Qurashi stole the show with their immaculate rendering of the salaam. A number of ulemas and dignitaries including the Chief Khazi to the Government of Tamil Nadu, Salahuddin Md Ayub, Prof. Fayaz Bijli and Afzal Quraishi (DGM, HAL) were present.

The function came to an end with the recital of the Quran after Fajar prayers the next morning.

Dr. Farooq Ahmad Peer rummages through the pages of history finishing with a hopeful note

Historians believe that Kashmir used to be a huge lake - named Kashyap Sar - before human beings began to inhabit it. According to Nilmata Purana as well as Kalhana’s Rajtarangini, the Valley of Kashmir was a lake and Kashyap Rishi, a grandson of Brahama, is said to have drained out the waters of this lake, enabling people to settle on the land which thus emerged.

Nagas are believed to be the original inhabitants of Kashmir but recent discoveries put forward by archaeologists made at Burzahom, sixteen kilometers east of Srinagar establish that there lived some people before the Nagas also. And later a tribe believed to be Aryans made their way into Kashmir.

As the population increased, there was need of more land. Some people of the Aryan origin left the Valley and settled in other parts of the world. But those who did not leave and continued to remain here were known as Kashmiris. As believed Kashmiris have Aryan blood and have the same physical appearances, with fair complexion, strong, sound and handsome body. In the ancient times, Kashmir was dominated by Hindus but afterwards Islam spread in this part of the World, for which the influx of foreign adventurers, both from the south and from Central Asia had prepared the ground.

In the spread of Islam, the Sufis and Sayyids played a pivotal role. People were at that time dissatisfied with the misrule of their kings and the exploitation of Brahmins. The kings, the courtiers, royal persons, officers were lavishly and involved in immoral affairs; the condition of the people was miserable and they were in despair. Any sort of relief or change which could unshackle them from the obsolete customs, traditions and cruel political situation, was sure to be embraced.

But it is also a fact that the Hindu rulers seem to have been benevolent and generous to those who tried to bring the faith of Islam to Kashmir. The role of Sufis and Sayyids was also instrumental in spreading Islam here and the most important conversion which took place was that of the King Rinchana, by Bulbul Shah (RA).

The arrival of Sayyids is remarkably remembered mainly due to the arrival and great services rendered by Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani (RA) who introduced Islam here in letter and spirit and also introduced the Kubraviya order of Sufism in the Valley.

At the time Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani (RA) made his way into Kashmir, there was a handful of Muslims who had managed to establish a few mosques and alm–houses, but their traditions, culture, customs and habits were the same as those of the majority of people who were Hindus. Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani (RA), denounced all those practices which were against the spirit of Islam and devoted himself in transforming the country of Kashmir into an Islamic society.

Another great Sayyid who made a significant contribution towards the mission of spreading Islam in Kashmir was Mir Sayyid Mohammad Hamdani (RA), son of Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani (RA). Besides, the great services rendered by the Sayyids in changing the society of Kashmir into a morally sound one, the contributions of Sheikh Noor-ud–Din (RA), gave impetus to the spread of Islamic teachings and it is believed without any doubt that he transformed the social fabric in Kashmir.

The philosophy and simplicity of the Sheikh (RA) has deeply influenced the people of Kashmir irrespective of caste, colour, religion and creed. He is venerated everywhere and by everybody. He taught the concept of humanism, love, meditation, equality, and worship to God. His philosophy did not only teach spiritual equality of man but also involved economic and social equality. He loved all and inspired this society through his eternal verses which are cherished in the memory of Kashmiris.

History is witness to the fact that Kashmir has been a land of attraction for everybody and from the ancient times it has been a sacred land in which saints and sages meditated and worshiped devoutly. The great scholars and intellectuals of the world have visited this place and have given their own impressions and observations about Kashmir and Kashmiris. But this spiritually motivated culture in Kashmir seems to be withering away.

Kashmir has been deeply rooted in its tradition in the past and has survived under the onslaught of foreign invasions and intruders. The simple life of the people has survived the shock of many centuries of alien rule and people here have braved poverty, strife, conflicts, droughts, plagues, floods. But the circumstances in the present day life of Kashmir reveal that the rich legacy and the rich traditions on which the foundation of this society was laid, are under the materialistic onslaught. Spiritual values which were the pride of this society are receding in the other nations of the world today like Kashmir.

The people of Kashmir are simple, mild, hospitable, intelligent, and possess great abilities. They are always active and industrious to do something for themselves and for the society. There is no dearth of talent and intelligence and this soil has given birth to great leaders, thinkers poets, writers, scholars, doctors, teachers who have made their name at the national as well as at the international level.

Kashmiris are peace loving by nature but at times are sentimental and surprisingly unpredictable, a fact which certain great historians and noted foreign travelers have also marked. There is no possibility of denying the fact that due to situational instability, Kashmiris have always remained confused and so at times they react and behave in a manner which marks them as skeptical and volatile. This instability has made them victims of exploitation and vulnerability and as a matter of fact indecisiveness.

But there is no doubt that Kashmiris are intelligent and witty to understand what is right. Sir Walter Lawrence rightly remarks that “The Kashmiri is what his rulers have made him, but I believe and hope that two generations of a just and strong rule will transform him into a useful, intelligent and fair honest man.” The Kashmiris really need to have honest rulers who give them respect, justice and fair dealing with the aim to build confidence among them. And that they are really treated in a manner they deserve.

This kind of dealing shall make Kashmir a symbol of humanism, possessing a unique identity and culture which preserved it from the bloodshed committed in the name of religion elsewhere after partition.

The common Kashmiri wishes to live in peace like other people of the world and has a dream to take his nation to the heights of success in every sphere of life. However, the prevalent scenario shows that the condition and position of Kashmiris is grim and dreary with no hope of coming out of this situation. But times have proved that Kashmiris are courageous to brave all the situations. It is this bravery which shall make them defeat all the odds.

The Oxford University Press on Tuesday launched its latest publication ‘At the Shrine of the Red Sufi: Five Days and Nights on Pilgrimage in Pakistan’ written by the renowned German cultural anthropologist, Jürgen Wasim Frembgen.

Translated from German by Jane Ripken, the book takes the reader on a journey to experience the spiritual rapture, ecstasy, trance, magic, and devotion at the annual Urs celebrations held at Sehwan Sharif in honour of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar (LSQ), Pakistan’s most Sufi popular saint.

Stefan Weidner, a renowned writer and expert on Islam, has judged this book [German language version] as “one of the most exciting reports we owe to German cultural anthropology in recent decades”.

Dr Jürgen Wasim Frembgen is Chief Curator of the Oriental Department at the Museum of Ethnology in Munich as well as Professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Munich. He has been a visiting professor at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad and the National College of Arts in Lahore.

The speakers were of the view that Frembgen’s book was of immense value as there is no other record in this depth of pilgrimage in Pakistan to an old and famous shrine, with detailed information of the different kinds of groups that participate, their rites and rituals of devotion, and the sacred geography of shrines and pilgrimages for qalandars in Pakistan.

***From the Oxford University Press Pakistan's website:

Readership / Level The narrative combines ethnographic “thick description” with a literary approach. This book is recommended for people interested in Islam, the lived Sufi tradition, Pakistan in general as well as literature reflecting quotidian Pakistani life.

About the AuthorJürgen Wasim Frembgen is Chief Curator of the Oriental Department at the Museum of Ethnology in Munich as well as Professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Munich. Since 1981 he has been teaching anthropology and Islamic Studies at different universities in Germany; in addition he had been a visiting professor at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad (National Institute of Pakistan Studies), National College of Arts in Lahore, and Ohio State University in Columbus, USA.

He has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan (for instance in Nager and Hunza/Karakoram, Indus Kohistan, Punjab, and Sindh) on an annual basis since 1981.

He has written extensively on cultures of the Eastern Muslim world between Iran and India, focusing particularly on Pakistan. Many of his books and articles deal with Islam, the Sufi tradition, veneration of Muslim saints, art and material culture, the anthropology of the body, social outsiders, and facets of popular culture.

The Friends of God—Sufi Saints in Islam: Popular Poster Art from Pakistan (2006/OUP) and Journey to God: Sufis and Dervishes in Islam (2008/OUP).

In addition, he has curated numerous exhibitions dealing with cultures of the Muslim world.

Monday, March 21, 2011

By Maggie Morris-Knower, *Students whirl their way to wisdom* - The Lamron - Geneseo, N.Y., USA; Thursday, March 10, 2011

The ordinarily lackluster interior of the Holcomb cafetorium was invigorated this Tuesday by the two workshops taught by Sheikha Khadija Radin on the ancient Sufi practices of dance and meditation.

Participants included students, faculty and local area residents. All in attendance enjoyed the eye-opening experience of a lesson that combined Eastern philosophy and spinning around barefoot in circles.

Khadija began by drawing the audience members' attention to the ways that they perceive the world around them with a brief lecture on consciousness and the philosophy of Sufi meditation. She explained that everything we experience "is an immaculate conception, born out of impulses in the brain." Continuing this line of thought, she asked the group to share their own beliefs on human spirituality and experience.

After a short discussion, Khadija demonstrated the proper way to turn, starting with her arms folded across her chest, hands on her shoulders and her head bent slightly toward the floor. With small steps and gradually speeding up, she whirled her arms along with her body, never losing the grace that continuously propelled her in circles.

Finally, it was the group's turn to give it a whirl. Spreading across the floor of the cafeteria, people began to spin to the steady, carefree beat of "Clint Eastwood" by Gorillaz. Not everyone was able to keep their balance the whole time, but even those who were overcome with dizziness seemed to have enjoyed the experience.

Students and faculty alike said that although the movements may have seemed strange at first, there was a lot more to spinning in circles than could have been guessed.

"You would never think that whirling or Sufi mysticism could have any kind of practical application for college students, but it definitely does," said senior Garrett Burger after Khadija led the group in a seated meditation exercise aimed at alleviating anxiety. Sociology professor Joanna Kirk said that she planned to start incorporating stress-relieving breathing exercises into her exams.

Khadija commented on the perception that sticking to a dance career is impractical, saying, "I'd like a nickel for every little girl who says they're going to be a dancer when they grow up." She said she would have lost that wager had she been betting on her own chances of sticking with dance.

After studying dance at The Juilliard School and working as a choreographer and modern dance teacher, Khadija moved to an ashram in San Francisco where she began to practice meditation under the guidance of Swami Muktananda. It was while living there that her life changed suddenly for the second time upon being introduced to Sufism at a memorial for a prominent teacher.

The journey since her initial encounter with Sufi mysticism has taken Khadija all over the world, from Israel to India, Palestine to Turkey and eventually to upstate New York, where she founded the Dervish Retreat Center in 1999.

Mogadishu: Somali President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed said Thursday pro-government forces were defeating Islamist rebels, vowing that the military drive against the insurgents will go on until they are eliminated.

"The Somali forces and peacekeepers in Mogadishu are now winning the war to curb the threats of Al-Qaeda elements and their backers in Somalia," said Sharif when he visited military bases in the capital Mogadishu.

"This is a tremendous victory for which we should be proud."

In the largest coordinated offensive in years, government forces backed by African Union troops launched heavy battles in Mogadishu last month and seized control of key positions that were held by the Shebab insurgents.

Battles in the south of the country by pro-government militia also saw the rebels ousted from key towns.

"The military offensive will not stop until we eliminate the terrorist elements from our country," Sharif said.

However, in central Somalia regions, residents said Thursday the insurgents were re-arming as clashes broke out between the Shebab and the pro-government Sufi militia Ahlu Sunna wal Jamaa.

"We have attacked the biggest base of the enemy. We inflicted heavy losses on them and the fighting is still going on," said Sheikh Daud Moalim Abdulahi, an official of the Sufi militia.

The African Union in January criticised Sharif's government, whose mandate comes to an end in August, for doing little to restore stability in the war-torn country.

In the last three years, the Shebab have seized control of much of southern and central Somalia and pushed the government to a small area of the capital where it is protected by the AU forces.

Friday, March 18, 2011

An oil heiress first finds art, then whirls into a Sufi space beyond religions.

Allah has spread the earth for us as a beautiful carpet on which to prostrate. In prostration we come nearer than near and we go nearer than that. When we rise up, ready to serve, we carry the experience of prostration within us. Then we see the face of the Beloved everywhere.

— Sheikha Fariha al-Jerrahi, “The Nur Ashki Jerrahi Dervishes”

By the time the auctioneer’s gavel fell, marking the bankrupt denouement of the Dia Art Foundation’s heroic first decade, the obituaries were already being written. All the elements were in place for what Phoebe Hoban in New York magazine dubbed “Dallas in SoHo”: an elusive oil-money dynasty in turmoil; a wayward heiress; an archipelago of prime real estate sites, transformed into shrines. There were big egos and even bigger lawsuits, featuring angry titans of the American contemporary art scene, high-flying dreamers suddenly dispossessed by an arts foundation like no other.

Launched under several aliases and in near-secrecy in 1974, Dia was the well-funded lovechild of a German art visionary named Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil, a strikingly beautiful spiritual seeker and youngest scion of the Schlumberger oil fortune. De Menil’s largesse had created a kind of refuge from the speculative market in art then taking shape in New York, and a new canon of monumental, spiritually charged epics: a SoHo gallery floor buried, permanently, with black earth; a hollowed-out volcano, transformed into a science-fictional archaeo-astronomical laboratory for perceptual flight; a Promethean bed of nails poking dangerously into the desert sky, awaiting some gargantuan penitent.

Asceticism on such a scale is expensive: in 1979 alone, Dia purchased Bob Whitman’s performance space on West 19th Street; an old church in Bridgehampton for the Dan Flavin Art Institute; a castle in Garrison, New York (also for Dan Flavin); and a decommissioned army base in Marfa, Texas, for Donald Judd. The foundation spent some four million dollars on a veritable drone-abbey for La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and their teacher Pandit Pran Nath at 6 Harrison Street in TriBeCa. With an annual operating budget of $500,000 and a staff in the dozens, the “Dream House” featured sound and light displays designed to induce altered states of consciousness, living quarters, recording facilities, and a performance space. In the space of a few years, Dia had built itself an instant empire of permanent installations, one-man museums, avant-garde cloisters, and desert redoubts.

But it took even less time to come apart. Amid falling share prices and rumors of an investigation of financial improprieties by New York’s attorney general, a group of concerned de Menils had launched a coup in 1984, replacing the original board with a respectable firewall of uptown lawyers and suits, putting much of Dia’s real estate and art holdings on the auction block and sequestering Philippa’s money in a trust. The stage was set for an epic confrontation between the suits and the dreamers… that never quite came to pass. The enigmatic Friedrich quit New York, disappeared into a wandering, art-mad exile; Philippa de Menil, the embattled heiress, had long since ceased to exist. In 1980, the woman she was had become a Sufi dervish named Fariha al-Jerrahi, and when the house of Dia fell, she moved on.

Sitting across from her now, amid photographs and Turkish rugs in a rambling old bohemian mansion on a hilltop in Yonkers, I’m almost reluctant to bring up those years. It had taken me many months to persuade her to give an interview, an extended negotiation with her assistant that settled into a rhythm of deferral: yes, Fariha al-Jerrahi was open to the idea of meeting with me, but it would take time. The Sheikha, he said, was in Istanbul this month. The Sheikha was on a retreat with her dervishes. The Sheikha was out of town. I assured him that I wasn’t interested in raking the muck of Dia’s internal politics; he assured me that the Sheikha would never talk about that, in any case. Yet here we were, talking about the evening in February 1985 when one era ended and a new one mysteriously began.

It wasn’t the impending sale of the Twomblys and Warhols that she recalled to me, though, nor Judd’s enraged legal wranglings, nor even the first meeting of Dia’s new board, presided over by her conservative sister-in-law. It wasn’t the death of the Dia dream, either; it was the death in Istanbul, half a world away, of Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak, the nineteenth spiritual leader of the Halveti-Jerrahi Sufi order. What transpired that night wasn’t “Dallas in SoHo”; it was the occult lifting of the bridal veil on Sheikh Muzaffer’s soul, its absorption into God’s divine love and mercy—a moment, she said, when even the angels wept. That month also witnessed the quiet shuttering of a most unusual mosque, the Masjid al-Farah. Perhaps the only mosque in the world kitted out with Dan Flavin light installations, the space, a vast converted firehouse on Mercer Street, pushed the metaphysical tendencies of the early Dia Foundation to their logical limit: the Masjid al-Farah was a permanent installation in the heart of lower Manhattan, an avant-garde Sufi lodge for the ages.

The story, as Sheikha Fariha tells it, begins with her mother, Dominique de Menil, and a vow she made to her husband, John. The couple had begun collecting art in the 1940s at the insistence of Father Marie-Alain Couturier, a Dominican priest and “radical Christian,” in the Sheikha’s words. Couturier was a vigorous advocate for the place of modern art in the Catholic Church, the force behind a midcentury chapel-building spree in France that included famous commissions for Henri Matisse and Le Corbusier, among others. He was also the force behind the best-known legacy of the de Menils’ arts patronage, a chapel in Houston housing fourteen canvases by Mark Rothko. Stripped of explicit references to any formal religion, the de Menils envisioned the Rothko Chapel—which opened in 1971, a year after its eponymous creator’s suicide—as an ecumenical temple of the spirit, an open space for believers and nonbelievers alike.

“Truthfulness, that’s the main quality to seek in anything,” Fariha says of Couturier’s influence on her parents, “whether that’s in a spiritual path, whether that’s in art, in life: truthfulness.” As part of chapel’s inauguration, the de Menils conducted a far-ranging interfaith outreach program, visiting with representatives of the world’s major religions.

It was in that context that the de Menils attended a performance by a group of whirling dervishes from Turkey. John de Menil was impressed; shortly before his death in 1973, he made his wife promise she would bring them back. Four years later, Dominique was working out the details of an American tour with Tosun Bayrak, a Turkish translator and author. Philippa was there, and her brief conversation with Bayrak changed her life. “The Mevlevis are wonderful,” he told her, referring to the Rumi-inspired order of dervishes that had made such an impression on her father. “But you should meet my Sheikh.” Bayrak was a devoted follower of Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak, and when he said the name aloud she felt a mysterious recognition, like the fragrance of Joseph’s garment. She saw him for the first time soon after, at a traditional Turkish dhikr, a Sufi ceremony that involves chanting, singing, and movement; the name literally means “remembrance of God.” She says she felt then that she was seeing the living Christ surrounded by the apostles. When she saw the Sheikh again a few days later at the home of an American Sufi, he was singing.

It was his grave and powerfully affective voice that overwhelmed her, she says, awakening in the ear of her soul the genetic remembrance of the most beautiful sound: the word of God, asking, Alastu birabbikum, “Am I not your Lord?” In an interview from 1978, Sheikh Muzaffer extolled “the beauty of that sound, the memory of which still lives in man and in all creation, and makes us tender to beautiful sounds.”

The meeting proved fortuitous not only for Dia’s co-founder, but for Muzzafer and his order as well: the Halveti-Jerrahi Sufis’ historically close association with the arts and the Ottoman elite had found a New World analogue in this extravagant patron of the most spiritually adventurous fringe of the downtown art scene. What’s more, Sheikh Muzaffer had had a prophetic dream that the United States was poised at a kind of threshold, and that it was his destiny to bring Islam there, to a city, New York, whose social and religious multiplicity represented the crucible of a new humanity in a “space beyond religions.” It was foreordained: a veritable princess of the underground, in a grand act of renunciation, became a faqir, a pilgrim, and a stranger.

And then she died, in a manner of speaking. Every dervish, the Sheikha tells me, must “die before she dies,” shedding the external forms of identity that constitute the “lower self”—a principal source of attachment in a world characterized by impermanence, longing, and loss—and gradually realizing a kind of supreme identity with Allah, the uncreated Creator, the primum mobile, behind and beyond all names and forms. Indeed, the personal journey of each dervish is a kind of extended sacrifice of the lower self, involving ever finer shades of depersonalization, beginning with the “handtaking” ceremony that attaches her to her sheikh and proceeding through adherence to the sunnah of the prophet Mohammed—fasting during Ramadan, for example, and performing the salat or Muslim prayer five times a day—to ever more gnostic forms of selflessness, culminating in the blissful annihilation of the rational, calculating lower self and the complete harmonization of the individual heart with God’s inscrutable will.

Perhaps this oft-repeated injunction—“you must die before you die”—helps explain why convincing the Sheikha to grant me an interview was so difficult; she is long past the point of being profiled.

***

By the time she’d shed her born identity, Fariha and her co-conspirator Heiner Friedrich had presided over a far-reaching intervention in the American contemporary art scene, funding and making possible projects of a scale and ambition that the market could never support—and which, in their grappling with outsize questions of spirit, struck some outside observers as pretentious and grandiose. When you consider the way in which these two gestures were intertwined—the removal of the art-market’s constraints and the pursuit of metaphysical truth—it’s no surprise that so much of Dia’s history played out in chapels. Friedrich himself remembers conceiving the idea of Dia in 1957, a nineteen-year-old alone in the sepulchral interior of Padua’s fourteenth-century Scrovegni Chapel. Frescoed by the artist Giotto into a Dantean dream theater of the Christian cosmos, the chapel seems to inhabit its own idiosyncratic temporal order, an apocalyptic present where disparate strands of forever intersect, the circles of hell and the unblinking celestials staring down from among the stars in the ceiling’s azure midnight. Standing there overwhelmed, the pilgrim Friedrich fell into an amour fou for eternities not easily realized, for visions and schemes exalted by their very impossibility, situated outside the ordinary economy of things.

The economy of things was an especial concern for Friedrich’s Renaissance forebear Enrico Scrovegni. Scrovegni was heir to the fortune of a man whom his contemporary, the poet Dante, portrayed in The Inferno as the arch-usurer of the age, hung in a noose tied from his money-bag, tortured eternally (right next to the sodomites). According to Dante, usury is a perversion of God’s will because it runs counter to both Nature and Art: God spends, Nature spends, the artist spends, the patron spends. But the usurer hoards. A man, insofar as he calculates, buys, sells, and takes a profit, becomes a slave to things. The chapel in Padua was Scrovegni’s expiation for this sin, a sacrificial gift born of his father’s accursed interest. It was a confession, and an emulation of the divine: a gift so far beyond bounds that a kind of escape velocity was achieved. It was a gesture at once ascetic and grandiose, penitent and self-aggrandizing, austere and opulent. When Heiner Friedrich visited, he saw in the chapel a cosmic marriage of patron, artist, theme, and real estate: he saw Dia.

In 1972 Friedrich arrived in Houston, Texas, where he talked one of Dominique de Menil’s assistants, a young curator named Helen Winkler, into letting him spend the night inside the newly completed Rothko Chapel. He emerged the next day, talking excitedly in his heavily accented English, astounding Winkler with his synesthetic understanding of the paintings. Friedrich’s night alone in the chapel not only gave him a glimpse of what John Ruskin’s “fiery cross of truth” might look like on American soil, it also procured his introduction, via Winkler, to the de Menils’ youngest daughter. And with that meeting, Friedrich’s impossible Paduan daydream became, suddenly, inevitable. The Dia Art Foundation was incorporated soon after, led by Friedrich, Philippa de Menil, and Winkler.

Dia’s projects—the effable ones, that you might see in a gallery—were few in number, and the ones that de Menil preferred consisted of the sort of work that the speculators and gallery-scene critics tended to regard with a cynicism bordering on contempt. “The Emperor’s New Cat Box” was the headline of Thomas Hess’s venomous New York magazine review of Walter De Maria’s Earth Room, a 1977 installation that exemplified the uncompromising impracticality and austere, almost ascetic, formalism that typified many of Dia’s artists. Earth Room buried a Dia-funded white-cube gallery at 141 Wooster Street beneath 280,000 pounds of moist Long Island dirt, creating a breathing and humid hothouse, fecund and material, sheeted into epochal layers like a cross-section drawing in a geology textbook. Art historian Julie Sylvester, interviewed in 1996, recalled going to the opening, “thinking there would be a crowd. There was no one but this German guy in a well-cut raincoat whispering to himself, ‘I zink we must make dis permanent.’” Dia purchased a new, bigger gallery for Friedrich, designed by the architect Richard Gluckman, and Earth Room became an exhibition in perpetuity.

1977 was also the year that De Maria completed Lightning Field, perhaps the most iconic Dia project, a precisely gridded array of four hundred stainless steel rods, poking at the New Mexico sky from a rectangle of land measuring a mile on one side, a kilometer on the other. Lightning Field takes the faqir’s spiny bed into the flat plains of the western high desert and scales it exponentially upward, reimagining the artwork not as an object of detached contemplation but as a site of pilgrimage. (Complete with an elaborate and sometimes cryptic set of rules—a code of conduct limits the number of visitors to six at a time, all of whom are required to spend the night in a simple cabin on the property, eating only vegetarian meals and maintaining an atmosphere of decorum.) The air above its colossal bed of nails calls forth concentrated pulses of cosmic energy, thunderbolts, the laughter of the gods.

In its layout, the clean modernity of the kilometer collides with the storied, irrational mile, the grounded Cartesian subject with the blinding natural disaster of an infinite, immanent object, channeled and summoned like a monster from the other side of time. De Maria turns the desert wastes into a theater where such collisions are conjured, where the I, stripped down to the sensory bone, dies a kind of death.

***

The Sheikha is the first to admit that her time at Dia prepared the way for Sheikh Muzaffer’s American mission and her subsequent retreat from the world of contemporary art. But a broader cultural shift was under way, as well, exemplified by the rising New Age movement, the emergence of so-called World Music pioneered by Brian Eno and Jon Hassel, and the growing acceptance of non-western religious traditions in academia and popular culture. Primed by earnest comparative religion programs in the universities, by anthologies of Hindu and Buddhist “scripture,” and by Book of the Dead-inspired acid trips—even, finally, by the spread of yoga—many of the baby boomers in New York’s downtown loft scene fetishized “the East,” a fuzzy geographical abstraction inherited from earlier generations, as the antithesis of the materialist, technological West.

But by 1978, the year Edward Said called attention to the peculiarly self-serving history behind this way of describing the world in his book Orientalism, the East was a geographical abstraction thickly, impressively peopled with self-appointed spokesmen, wanderers, and expats—men like Muzaffer, or like Pandit Pran Nath, whose Dia-funded concerts merged trance-inducing drone electronics with virtuosic, albeit idiosyncratic, Hindustani vocal performance. It was all part of a plan, the Sheikha says, the mystical preparation for the advent of a dervish America.

No one embodied all of these currents better than Lex Hixon, an American-born one-time radio-show host and comparative religion scholar who became the spiritual head of New York’s dervish community after Sheikh Muzaffer’s death in 1985. As Sheikh Nur al-Jerrahi, Hixon forged a uniquely and explicitly American adaptation of Muzaffer’s traditional Ottoman-style Sufism, informed by his studies and his previous spiritual adventures in Tantric Hinduism (especially his devotion to the goddess Kali). By the end of his life, Hixon had also been initiated in some form or other into Tibetan Buddhism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Soto Zen, and he continued to publish translations, scholastic commentaries, and mystical and devotional texts for all of the above after becoming a dervish.

Fariha felt that Hixon’s succession as leader of the downtown Sufis was the realization of a grand cosmic plan—Sheikh Muzaffer’s dream—for a new Islam, freed from the interpretations of the black-robed “doctors of the faith” and the repressive accretions that had come to obscure its radiant essence in so many parts of the traditional Muslim world. This Islam, promulgated by what they now called the Nur Ashki Jerrahi order, was a mystical phoenix on the rise in Lower Manhattan.

It is difficult to say with any certainty which of his many religious affiliations Hixon identified with most closely; to the Nur Ashki Jerrahis he will always remain Sheikh Nur al-Anwar al-Jerrahi, the light of lights, and the Pir of the New Humanity. Of all the charismatic religious teachers Hixon had interviewed during his thirteen-year run as the host of a New Age radio show called In the Spirit—an illustrious group that included the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa, among many others—it was Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak who turned him from interviewer into lifelong devotee. In 1979, Hixon went to Istanbul and spent the month of Ramadan with Muzaffer and his dervishes in the Bayazit mosque, listening to the recitation of the Qur’an. Sitting there by his sheikh’s side, Hixon received the first of his own prophetic dervish-dreams, a vision of a cosmic Qur’an written in radiant, golden light, chanting itself in an emerald mosque beyond the highest paradise. The vision was the sign of what was to come: his initiation as a Sufi, and his transformation, in 1980, into Sheikh Nur.

“It was like a Shams and Mevlana meeting,” Sheikha Fariha told me, referencing the Sufi poet better known as Rumi and his beloved companion Shams. “And just as a man and woman coming together can produce a child, two mystics coming together can produce a whole new civilization, a spiritual civilization,” she said. In Nur and his visions, the Sheikha had discovered an avenue for transcendence more powerful than Lightning Field, and her investment in the arts, and in Dia, began to wane.

***

If Fariha’s stories—and those that attend the early years of Dia, in general—all seem to have the air of myth, it’s no accident: on the pilgrim’s road, every encounter is portentous, every mishap a blessing in disguise. The vicissitudes that beset and transform us, seemingly at random, organize themselves into webs fraught with meaning. Indeed the figure of the sacred wanderer is an important one for the Nur Ashki Jerrahis, for whom life on Earth comprises a nested, interrelated set of pilgrimages: an inner journey that leads from head to heart; more conventional travels to Istanbul and Konye, as well as the Hajj; and finally, peregrinations around an America remapped according to an idiosyncratic sacred geography, with New York City at its center—the esoteric setting for the advent of what the Sheikha calls “the New Humanity.” In this sense, Nur Ashki Jerrahi theology is continuous with the westering impulse that runs through so many American mythologies. But seen from another angle, the order’s adaptation of Turkish-style Sufi practice to its American context—the translations of the tariqat’s sacred texts, the relaxation of the formal etiquette that typifies interactions between sheikh and dervish, the explicit feminization of the order, both in terms of its hierarchy and its conception of the Creator—is typical of the way that Sufi Islam has spread for centuries.

Whether in the jungle wilds of Mughal India’s Bengal frontier, the marabouts’ desert fortresses in Western Sahara, or indeed in the Ottoman dervish lodges once common throughout the Balkans, successful Sufi teachers have always shown a genius for adapting to local linguistic, religious, and cultural contexts. Sufism—or Sufisms—tend to unsettle naive notions of religious identity, creating compelling hybrid forms of spiritual practice at once deeply Islamic and profoundly subversive of censorious desert traditions.

Not that the Nur Ashki Jerrahis feel they have anything to hide: for Sheikha Fariha and her followers, their practice is not simply a form of Islam, it is Islam itself. Stripped of its Sufi heart, she tells me, Islam ceases to be beauty, becomes something more like a prison, ossified and empty. But Islam is, in a narrow sense, ultimately a means to an end: Sheikh Nur called it “Universal Islam,” by which he meant an Islam beyond religion, a utopian “open space” in which all of the world’s sacred traditions—and all of their initiates—fall in love, dance, and dissolve into each other: the friars and the yogis and the dervishes. As he sang, “Sun that rises from the East awakens now within the West… Eagle soaring in the West, True Kaaba whirling in the West.”

***

In the brief annals of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi order, few stories are as exemplary as the tale of Sheikh Nur’s pilgrimage to another pivotal node in the sacred map of the Americas—to Tepeyac in Central Mexico, seeking permission from none other than the Virgin of Guadalupe to bring his Sufi order to that country.

According to Sheikha Amina al-Jerrahi—leader of the now-thriving Nur Ashki Jerrahi community in Mexico City—Sheikh Nur “felt guided to go to Mexico” in 1987. An ordinary religious leader may well have started his mission abroad with a visit to the municipal authorities, or perhaps sought out communities of Muslim immigrants who might be thought to be most receptive to his teachings. Sheikh Nur, as it happens, sought out a group of the indigenous circle-dancing concheros—a troupe of ritual dancers who trace their ancestry to pre-Columbian mystics—to serve as his companions, along with Sheikha Amina and Sheikha Fariha. Nur also brought along a holy relic—a hair from the beard of the prophet Mohammed. “The first thing that he did was to go to the Virgin and ask the Virgin for permission to found the tariqat, to open the order there,” Sheikha Amina said.

This wasn’t as odd as you might think. The Virgin Mary—Hazreti Maryam, as Sheikha Fariha refers to her, using a Turkish-derived Islamic honorific—and her prophetic son are objects of reverence throughout the Muslim world. Indeed, Sheikh Muzaffer himself wrote a book of meditations on the Virgin under his penname, Ashki. Sheikha Fariha refers to a saying of the prophet that promises the Virgin Mary to the prophet Mohammed as his bride, in paradise. Bringing the prophet’s relic to the shrine at Guadalupe “was like bringing the beloveds together,” she says. “And so he set her on fire with love. And she opened the way for Nureddin Jerrahi.”

But Sheikh Nur was not simply interested in the marriage of Christian and Muslim conceptions of Mary: he was drawn, too, to the mestizo character of the Virgin’s shrine at Tepeyac, where pre-Christian iconography and ritual practice survive to this day, adorned with the icon’s Catholic trappings. For Sheikh Nur, the ardent student of Hindu divinity, the Virgin of Guadalupe must have seemed like an American Devi, a super-goddess accommodating the holy continent’s diverse sources of sacred power in the folds of her raiment: the indigenous shaman’s dances, the Sufi prophet’s dreams, and the Catholic hymns of the true believer. She grants wishes to grandmothers and children, blazes with the mystical fire of love. She reveals esoteric truths. In Mexico, she is the matrix for a sense of belonging that supersedes the affective bonds of caste, color, and creed. Little wonder, then, that Sheikh Nur named the home of the order in Mexico City Mezquita Maria de la Luz—Mosque of the Luminous Mary.

In Mexico, Nur attracted new followers by holding dhikr ceremonies, by interpreting his disciples’ dreams—among the Sheikh’s titles is “dream-key to the dream-lock”—and by composing an extraordinary set of Sufi hymns in Spanish (a language he did not know) by sitting down with a set of vocabulary words and engaging in a kind of divinely inspired automatic writing.

***

“Mexico was Nur’s Medina,” Sheikha Fariha tells me over tea in her home, high above Yonkers, “just as this house was Sheikh Muzaffer’s.” She laughs. “New York was Mecca, for both of them.” Nowhere was the city’s centrality to the order more spectacularly evident than in the original home of the Masjid al-Farah at 155 Mercer Street in SoHo, a cathedral-size space that split the difference between what was already becoming known as “The Dia Look”—spare and modern—and the traditional interiors of Istanbul’s magnificent mosques. The purchase itself was controversial: the building’s new owners were contractually obligated to use the space as a home for modern dance performance, a restriction inserted by the local community board to encourage famed choreographers Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis to take possession of the property. But the Dia foundation outbid them.

Neighbors complained that the building, despite its Dan Flavin light installations and its auditorium, seemed to play host to a single style of dance, characterized by circling, planetary orbits—one whose modernity was by no means a settled matter. The Masjid al-Farah was a building whose use finally, and perhaps fatally, blurred the already fuzzy line between the sacred and the secular in Dia’s reenchanted alt-modernity. When the new Dia board assembled in 1985, the mosque was closed, and the fledgling Nur Ashki Jerrahi dervish order, led by Sheikh Nur, found its present home on West Broadway. Sometime around then, they started calling the space the Dergah al-Farah.

Nowadays the little storefront, wedged between restaurants on a busy street in TriBeCa, is practically invisible every day but Friday. On Fridays the Dergah’s spry, bushy-browed prayer-leader, Imam Faisal Rauf, would draw overflow crowds for the communal afternoon salat. They had to schedule three separate sessions in order to accommodate all of the worshippers; the small bathroom upstairs was trashed by all the ablutions. Perhaps it was his many years delivering the khutbah, or sermon, in such cramped quarters that inspired Rauf and his friend Sharif el-Gamal, a real-estate developer and Friday regular, to dream of a vastly larger space, a thirteen-floor community center, dervish lodge, and prayer space—a project they have called at various times Cordoba House and Park 51, though it is better known, inaccurately, as the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

But the relationship between the Nur Ashki Jerrahis and the masses of faithful who attend the mosque’s Friday salat is complicated. Reflecting the city’s shifting demographics, they are mostly men, and mostly migrants from Muslim countries for whom the order’s beliefs and practices—along with its leader’s gender—are heterodox in the extreme. There is little, if any, overlap between the community that gathers at sunset Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Friday visitors, a distance that clearly troubles Sheikha Fariha. Although Imam Rauf is a Sufi sheikh, too, he is not of the Nur Ashki Jerrahis: after Sheikh Muzaffer’s passing, Rauf and a handful of more conservative dervishes (including Sheikh Tosun Bayrak, the translator who introduced Philippa de Menil to his beloved sheikh so many years ago) opted not to follow Sheikh Nur. Of Rauf, the Sheikha observes, “He did not go through Nur, and that makes a big difference.”

Rauf left the Dergah al-Farah a year ago. Perhaps navigating the tiny space was too unwieldy for the busy imam, but for Sheikh Nur it was a “jewel box.” It sits like a heart, hidden away amid a city that Fariha sees as the very model for peaceful coexistence, a Noah’s ark for a world poised at the brink of catastrophe. “Look at all the religious teachers that have come here,” she says. When Sheikh Muzaffer first visited, he led a group of dervishes in Muslim prayer at the World Trade Center. Sheikh Nur liked to say that the Twin Towers were Muzaffer’s minarets, while the Empire State Building—where the former Lex Hixon had broadcast his radio interview with the Turkish mystic—was his minbar, or pulpit.

For a Nur Ashki Jerrahi dervish, the whole world is a prayer carpet; but New York is particularly sacred.

When I raise the question of 9/11 and “ground zero,” Fariha becomes passionate. She finds it especially appalling that commercial spaces—rental properties and real estate—are being built at the site. “It is absolutely holy ground! But it isn’t being treated as holy ground.” There are competing sacred geographies at work, to be sure, but even more, there are radically different notions of what we owe to the dead. Dia’s beautiful dervish-founder says the answer is simple: we owe them our love, and a sacrifice.

***

I joined the dervishes and their Sheikha recently for the Tuesday evening meshq ceremony. It’s a low-key affair, unlike events held there on Thursdays. Everyone arrived late—“dervish standard time,” someone quipped—and there was a lot of chitchat and hugging going around. The members of the order are a heterogeneous group, a happy mix of ages and backgrounds, and they all seemed perfectly content at the notion of an evening together, singing Sheikh Nur’s translations of the Turkish hymns that the dervishes and their Sheikha revere as an extension of the Qur’an itself. One of them leads the salat, chanting the call to prayer from the front of the room, first in Arabic, then in Sheikh Nur’s English:

Supreme Reality is always greater than any conceptionI witness that there is no reality apart from Supreme RealityI witness that Mohammed is an authentic Messenger of Supreme RealityCome to salatCome to the highest spiritual realizationAllah is always greaterNothing exists apart from Allah.

Later, during a break in the singing, the dervishes—who number around ten this evening—ask Fariha a few questions. One of them, a young Turkish man, asks her about the time Sheikh Muzaffer made her a Sheikha, alongside Sheikh Nur. If that all happened in 1980, he says, then this year represents the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the order.

“That’s true!” I think, “maybe even a fine hook for the essay,” and look over to see her, laughing at the thought.

This piece originally appeared in Bidoun, a quarterly magazine about art and culture in the Middle East.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

By Shana Maria Verghis, *‘Your energy must be directed in one place’* - The Pioneer - India; Friday, March 11, 2011

Satinder Sartaaj spends more time in libraries and writing lyrics for songs he sings, inspired by Sufi poets and limiting concerts to a handful. The Punjabi vocalist tells his career choices and decision to keep Bollywood offers at bay were guided by his level of inner satisfaction

Ranjeev and Parminder Singh Sidhu are an Indian couple working at Manchester University’s Department of Spiritual Studies. Recently, the duo spent about 25 days with Hoshiarpur-born Sufi singer Satinder Sartaaj, studying, as Satinder put it, “my state of mind, aura and other things, “when he was touring with his band. Their 100-something pages of research was published in the form of a book, accompanying one of his latest albums, Sai, which comes with a meditation CD.

Sai contains a single of the same name that is in the form of an ardaas or a request to God. Sartaaj is not keen to portray himself as some highly evolved spiritual soul, divinely inspired to write the lyrics to Sai, which are in chaste Punjabi. Nor does he fill your imagination with stories about the song coming to him in, say, a flash of light that left him in a trance or some such thing. The truth is, he was simply crossing in his house to the music room, when the first line, Koi Ali aakey, koi Wali aakhey (Some say Ali, some say Wali...) drifted into his consciousess. “I sing this at the beginning of my performance for blessings to give a good performance. That is all,” he said, keeping it simple.

The words to Sai invoke divine mercy and love, in the Sufi tradition, which Sidhu is a student of. He said, “The Sidhus spent a lot of time asking me questions. They know much that I don’t.” Sartaaj himself has sung from class three, and was drawn to Sufi music. He has an MS in music and PhD in Sufi music. He also has degrees in Urdu and Sanskrit and got a gold medal in Persian language.

For six years, he taught at Punjab University’s, Department of Music. “Most of the time I was in the library reading and studying. I have written about 500 songs.” Singh’s oeuvre covers classical poets like Rumi and Bulleh Shah. But his personal favourite is Babu Rajab Ali (1894-1979), an expert in a loud, stretched out way of singing, without instruments accompanying, called Kavishri.

“Babu Rajab Ali writes about everyday life, explained Sartaaj, “In the style called Bahaatar kilian chind, which is a form of folk poetry that is typically written in 72 stanzas.” He accompanies the instrument with his harmonium. The 31-year-old, who composed his first album in 2002, and found no takers for it till 2009, told us with some good humour that, “Realistically, the taste of the masses was for bhangra and hip-hop. It is not surprising no one promoted my album.”

Nevertheless, he saw attendance at his concerts grow from “50-100 to about 45,000 at a show I had in Kapurthala.” The turning point was a tour in Canada that “gave me exposure overseas and had 60 sold-out shows.” Now better known, he has been asked to act and sing in movies, but prefers to “spend 60-70 per cent of time on riyaaz, studies and family.” He said this ensures “performance does not suffer. If you take too many concerts, you stress your vocal chords and the show will be poor.”

Since his first album Ibadat, he has released two more, taking painstaking attention with the lyrics. “What keeps me going is the internal satisfaction I get. Not commercialism. I do what I feel and don’t go according to popular tastes. This means that I have my own particular kind of audience.”

Sartaaj explained, “It was during my Bachelors of Music, that I read Sufi stuff and decided to do my higher education in the subject. I was inclined that way from my childhood, though I wasn’t singing Sufi music then but other prayer songs, like the shabad kirtan. When I learnt Persian and did my PhD, I did a few mehfils from 2001. I try to maintain some decorum. So we don’t do parties and marriages.” All his poems, he added, “Do have a message. When its not about God, there is a social message. Like saving the trees. Or, I write about female foeticide.” He added that, “One of my songs was inspired by a little girl, picking sticks for firewood whom I had seen during a picnic excursion.”

Before he writes, he does a short meditation, “to get concentration.” He said, “I began this during my PhD, when I was going through many books and earlier had a problem with focussing. It’s also useful when you perform sitting, three-four hours non-stop and need to be attentive, to give your best. Your whole energy must be directed in one place, by attuning body and mind.” He concluded, “When words to something like the ardaas come, it is a gift of God. People say Saraswati aayi hain. It is momentary inspiration. Not a continuous stream. And I try to do something good with it. Sufism to me is something that gives one internal satisfaction. Be it writing or performing. People urged me for years to change my style, but I am happy with it. As for religion, I think that is a private thing.”

"The only real testimony we have on it was actually from Sheikh Kabbani, who was a Muslim leader during the Clinton Administration, he testified, this is back in 1999 and 2000, before the State Department that he thought over 80 percent of the mosques in this country are controlled by radical Imams. Certainly from what I've seen and dealings I've had, that number seems accurate."--Rep. Peter King, Jan. 24, 2011

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, plans to hold controversial hearings Thursday on Islamic radicalism. King jokes that these hearings may make him famous "for a week," but he has already become well known for an assertion he once made that "80 to 85 percent" of the mosques in the United States are controlled by radical imams.

King now dismisses the comment as inconsequential, saying in an interview that he has no idea if the estimate is correct.

"I don't think it matters that much" because, according to Islamic leaders King said he has spoken with, imams do not have as much influence among the faithful as do priests or rabbis and because a relatively small percentage of American Muslims attend mosques.

"This is not that important to me," he said, adding: "I do think there is an inordinate amount of radical influence in mosques."

King added that he believes he made this comment on his own only once, and since then has simply responded to questions when interviewers raise it, such as in the quote above, when Raymond Arroyo, a guest host on radio's "Laura Ingraham Show," brought it up.

Nevertheless, this has become one of the most recognizable quotes associated with King. It has been repeated often in news reports about the upcoming hearings, so a casual listener might think there is a basis in fact. Let's look at the roots of this figure.

The Facts

This all started with a State Department forum in early 1999 on Islamic extremism that attracted virtually no media attention. That is, until a few months later, when virtually every major Muslim organization in the United States issued a joint statement condemning the remarks by Sheikh Hisham Kabbani as "unsubstantiated allegations that could have a profoundly negative impact on ordinary American Muslims."

With the passage of 12 years, Kabbani's comments -- made more than two years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- look both remarkably prescient and somewhat off the wall.

Kabbani, who practices Sufism, warned that "there are 5000 suicide bombers being trained by [Osama] bin Laden in Afghanistan who are ready to move to any part of the world and explode themselves."

But Kabbani also said that bin Laden's organization had been "able to buy more than 20 atomic nuclear heads from some of the mafia in the ex-Soviet Union, in the republics of the ex-Soviet Union, and they traded it for $30 million and 2 tons of opium." He added that they were breaking up "these atomic warheads into smaller partitions, like small chips, to be put in any suitcase."

As part of this discourse, Kabbani said that "Muslims, in general, are peace-loving and tolerant" but that 80 percent of the mosques in the United States are "being run by the extremist ideology, but not acting as a militant movement."

Kabbani offered no evidence to support this assertion and has provided little evidence since. In 2001, he told The New York Times that he had visited 114 mosques in the United States and "ninety of them were mostly exposed, and I say exposed, to extreme or radical ideology" -- through speeches, books and board members. "He said that a telltale sign of an extremist mosque was a focus on the Palestinian struggle," the Times reported.

In the interview, King said he did not rely just on Kabbani's statement but also on testimony before a Senate panel in 2003 by Stephen Schwartz, a Muslim convert who at the time was affiliated with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Schwartz has been a prominent opponent of Wahhabi Islam -- a strict sect of Islam described by some as extremist -- and he testified, "Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques -- out of a total ranging between an official estimate of 1,200 and an unofficial figure of 4-6,000 -- are under Wahhabi control."

Schwartz did not identify these community leaders, though before this appearance he had previously attributed this estimate to Kabbani's statement at the State Department. In an email, he said he "heard it from Kabbani but also heard it from the leaders of the main Shia mosques in the U.S." and that having attended services in the U.S. and other Western countries he believes "Sunni mosques in the U.S. are still, in 2011, overwhelmingly dominated by fundamentalists." He added: "Fixing a quantitative level is difficult but 75-80 percent still seems right to me."

Meanwhile, there have been efforts to actually measure the sentiment in American mosques.

University of Kentucky professor Ihsan Bagby in 2004 published a study of Detroit mosques that concluded that approximately 93 percent of mosque participants endorse both community and political involvement and more than 87 percent of mosque leaders support participation in the political process. Most were registered to vote and "because of these moderate views, mosque participants cannot be described as isolationists, rejecters of American society or extremists." (Some conservatives have noted that the study also found strong support for universal health care, affirmative action and Islamic law in Muslim-majority nations, as well as deep concern about immorality in the United States.)

King said he was unaware of the Detroit study.

The Pinocchio Test

The persistence of this "80 percent" statistic is mystifying. It is based largely on a single observation by one Muslim cleric 12 years ago, who has offered no evidence to make his claim. The one other possible source is the personal observations of Schwartz but as far as we can tell it has not been confirmed by any documented study.

The Fact Checker was inclined to award King quite a few Pinocchios before he came to the phone and essentially took it back. But he has a responsibility to clear the air and say that, in the absence of other evidence, he no longer thinks this 12-year-old "fact" has any relevance. He says that he was not planning to bring up this statistic in his hearing, but the very public platform he has Thursday morning would be a good place to clear the air.

In the quote above, King correctly noted that there was a single source and that it dates back to 1999. But then he went on to say the "number seems accurate," lending credence to the figure and giving a misleading impression that there is more to back it up.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

By Ivan Hewett, *Salisbury International Arts Festival: Fanfare for the common ground* - The Telegraph - London, UK; Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Christianity and Islam meet in a new oratorio written for the city’s cathedral. Hallelujah, says Ivan Hewett.

'The lamps are different but the light is one.” So wrote the great Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi, expressing the idea that all religions are really one and that praise offered to one deity praises all. It’s the guiding idea behind a new work, best described as a multi-faith oratorio, which will be unveiled at Salisbury International Festival.

Maria Bota, the festival’s director, has this year chosen “Bridges” as her theme – bridges between genres, cultures and religions. The great medieval cathedral of Salisbury is always at the centre of the festival, and so a work which threw a bridge between Christianity and another great world religion seemed essential.

By a happy coincidence, it turns out that Rumi was embarking on his life as poet and philosopher at the same time as the foundation stone of the medieval cathedral of Salisbury was being laid, in 1240. That initial idea has now blossomed into a 75-minute work entitled Where Two Worlds Touch, involving a professional choir of 70, a community choir of 130, four vocal soloists, a brass quintet, and a percussionist.

It’s the brainchild of author and storyteller Ashley Holland, who also chose the texts, which are spread across Christian and Islamic mystical sources. Musically it’s the joint creation of Howard Moody and Helen Chadwick, two composers from very different backgrounds.

For Moody, a keyboard player who’s worked with top-flight performers of Baroque music like John Eliot Gardiner and jazz musicians including John Surman, the piece was a homecoming. “I grew up as a chorister in Salisbury Cathedral, so this project is special to me,” he says. “The overriding factor in this piece was the cathedral and its fabulous acoustic, which I wanted to celebrate.”

Chadwick comes at the project having sat at the feet of traditional singers in Ghana and Corsica, and worked in community opera. “The solo voice is my focus,” she says, “although I’m interested in choral singing, too. There’s a tradition of Gaelic psalm-singing on the Isle of Lewis which to me seems exactly right for this big space, as it’s a way of creating polyphony without having to be exact about the rhythmic co-ordination.”

And the poetry? “I’ve loved Rumi’s poetry for years, so I’m setting most of those, though I’ve also bagged a line from St John of the Cross that I love.”

While Chadwick is setting her share of the texts in English, Moody is setting his in the original. “I’m fascinated by the music of each language,” he says, “and also by the way the language affects the meaning. For example in Hebrew there’s no conditional tense, which helps to explain why [the] Jewish belief system is so rooted in certainty. In Arabic the phrase 'peace process’ is hard to translate because there are so many ways of saying 'peace’.”

The songs are almost all written, so now comes the business of knitting them together. “We’re having a trial run-through to see if the order works,” Chadwick says. “That’s when we’ll find out if there are any odd key shifts we need to change.”

The composers also face another logistical challenge, to do with the way the physical location of the performers changes during the course of the piece. “There’s a symbolic coming together of the two choirs,” Moody says, “which reflects the idea of the meeting of two traditions. At the beginning the professional choir is on the platform and the community choir is at the back, but by the end they’ve come together.”

In a world where tensions between Christian and Muslim are becoming more acute, this admirable attempt to illuminate the common ground between two faiths, is much to be welcomed.

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